The new guidance gives people who are open to getting vaccinated but have not yet done so more incentive to do it: get vaccinated and you can stop wearing your mask most of the time. It should also encourage employers, schools, etc. to require vaccinations.
The reality is that in much if not most of the country unvaccinated people are already going around without masks or taking other steps to avoid getting infected. The CDC putting out guidance that those people reject has proven to be counterproductive. It makes no sense to make the rest of us act out irrational hygiene theater for the benefit of people who are ignoring it.
Not sure I understand your logic…“get vaccinated and you can stop wearing you mask most of the time”
sounds more like " or don’t get vaccinated and you can still stop wearing your mask most of the time", because no one is going to question you. Encouraging employers and schools to require vaccinations sounds great, but I have yet to see any business or place put that into effect.
At least when it was required to wear masks, unvaccinated people felt social pressure to wear them at at places like Trader Joes (who announced based on CDC’s new guideline that they wont require masks at all). Now they can go around and potentially infect kids under 12 and other people who have yet to be vaccinated.
Unmasked fully-vaccinated people are not a threat to people who are not vaccinated. If you live someplace with a significant percentage of irresponsible morons, maybe don’t take your kids to the store or other places where morons congregate.
Requiring employees and students to be vaccinated wasn’t practical until vaccination was available to everyone who wants it. There’s nothing new about mandatory vaccinations at schools, this is just one more on the list.
In California and presumably some other places, retailers like Trader Joe’s and Walmart still have to require customers to wear masks even if they’ve dropped their company-wide policy.
I think LA constitutes “someplace with a significant % of irresponsible morons”, although that’s obviously subjective. Last I heard 49% or 50% of people here have had their first shot. what’s the other 50% waiting on?
right, but unmasked people who are not vaccinated are a threat to people who are masked and not vaccinated (50% of LA) .Also, those links are by and large not accurate whatsoever. “broad majority”? I wonder how many businesses CNBC polled before publishing this. I don’t doubt that big companies will require it at some point in the future (when will that be?), but small businesses that make up this city wont require it.
I would love to see vaccination requirements, but unless its required by state law, then I don’t think it will happen.
Me too. It’s hard to believe that some places still won’t put salt and pepper shakers on tables, and that there are no salad bars. Like you’re going to get covid from touching a salt shaker or using a spoon at a salad bar. Good grief. We already have sneeze-guards at salad bars in CA, and even if some anti-social jerk were to actually bend over below the guard and sneeze directly onto the spinach, covid doesn’t transmit that way. It’s airborne, lung to lung, and that’s about it.
Officials pointed to a study released Friday of nearly 2,000 health-care workers across 25 states that showed the two mRNA vaccines reduced the risk of covid-19 by 94 percent. “This report provided the most compelling information to date that coronavirus vaccines were performing as expected in the real world,” CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky said in a news release. “This study, added to the many studies that preceded it, was pivotal to CDC changing its recommendations for those who are fully vaccinated against covid-19.”
Two other studies were key: A March report in Nature Medicine showed substantially reduced viral loads among Israelis infected with the coronavirus after their first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Lower viral load is thought to impede transmission of the virus, which would suggest vaccinated people do not spread the virus as easily. And a May 6 JAMA study found that a second Pfizer dose protected against even asymptomatic infections among fully vaccinated health-care workers.
The CDC is national, and in the US, one size does not fit all. Telling rational, responsible, vaccinated people that they have to keep wearing masks when they live in places where irrational, irresponsible, unvaccinated people are not seems counterproductive.
Let me guess you don’t have kids - if life would always this simple as some people want to make it. Covid has actually quite an impact on children already and having now many unvaccinated people running around without mask won’t minimize those numbers. (And we are talking just about deaths and hospitalization- there is more research going on about the potential long term effects of infected (sometimes asymptotic) children
“Now, the part where that conversation about severity gets a little bit more complicated is yes, it is absolutely true that it’s less severe in kids than it is in adults, and particularly older adults. But it’s also not true to say that it’s completely benign in kids. Fortunately, pediatric death is a fairly rare event. But when you look at the top 10 causes of death, on an annual basis, this year, we’ve had, depending on whose numbers you use, somewhere between 300 and 600 pediatric deaths from COVID-19 so far. That’s probably an undercount. And that would fit it somewhere in the top 10, somewhere between like No. 6 and No. 9 in terms of causes of death for children.
So the point I’m making, there is that yes, it’s less severe, but it’s still potentially a very severe disease. We’ve seen tens of thousands of hospitalizations already. So we do need a vaccine for children, not just to protect, not just to achieve herd immunity, but also to protect the children themselves.”
For what it’s worth, the director of the CDC said tonight in a Rachael Maddow interview that children age 0-12 should continue to wear masks. (Not sure how you get an infant, age 0, to wear a mask, though…)
And implicitly, children older than 12 should continue to wear masks until fully vaccinated/+14.
As to children going from 3% to 22.4% of new cases, well, of course. The number of new cases in adults has not gone up as much due to a significant chunk of the adult population now being fully vaccinated. So the proportion of new cases in the unvaccinated, including children, has gone up.
The CDC director also said that asymptomatic shedding of the virus by fully vaccinated people to unprotected people is unlikely. That in “the real world” the vaccines have proven to be effective against all of the variants currently in the US, and 95% effective against the original strain. And that if you’re vaccinated and do get a “breakthrough” case, it’ll almost always be very mild. And that all of the vaccines in the US have been 100% effective against death. One hundred percent.
IMO, if you qualify (and now only children under age 12 don’t), choosing not to get vaccinated is ludicrous, selfish, and foolish.
Have you read the interview? That wasn’t his point but the increase in severity with the new variants etc.
The CDC seems to be making conclusions without having really looked into all data as this topic is still unclear and a number of papers get published with different results - So he can’t really make this call yet (and the situation is also changing with new variants appearing, e.g. B.1.617.2
Not sure how he can make that assumption when there are a number of deaths reported with fully vaccinated people across the country and it has yet to be established the ultimate cause - here is just one of many reported cases (and yes, the vaccine is very effective but doesn’t prevent death 100%. They should be scientifically correct to increase confidence and people are still cautious enough in their behavior
As I said, “for what it’s worth”. I don’t have great confidence in the CDC right now either, but all of those things are what the director (a woman, by the way) said.
(Except for my comment relating to the percentage of new cases being children, which I probably should have left out, and also my opinion comment at the end, equally unnecessary – both departures from the main point of the post.)
When no one was vaccinated, everyone wearing masks meant that we were all protecting each other.
Now that many people are fully vaccinated, and the vaccines have proven effective against variants, the only reason to insist that everyone keep wearing masks is that you can’t trust some of the unvaccinated to follow the honor system. Why would the CDC want to be in the position of selling that to the public?
They wouldn’t. But it seems that if what’s being said is at least mostly true, then by a very large margin only the unvaccinated are truly vulnerable, and only to other unvaccinated people, in terms of getting a symptomatic infection. The problem is, there are still a lot of people who do want to get vaccinated who haven’t been able to yet for various reasons, including the entire youth population who have only recently qualified. If the unvaccinated are the least bit socially responsible, they’ll continue to wear masks to protect themselves and other unvaccinated people, CDC guidelines and state/local mandates notwithstanding. Once everyone who wants to get vaccinated has been able to, then the unvaccinated who shed masks will only put other unvaccinated people, and themselves, at risk. It’ll be their problem.
