In response to the CDC director, elevating the masks necessities is a mistake

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Joe Biden’s chief executive officer for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), listens as Biden announces candidates and officers for his health and coronavirus response teams during a press conference at his transitional headquarters Wilmington, Delaware, December 8, 2020.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Sunday it was too early for states to stop wearing masks as coronavirus cases and deaths are high in the US on a daily basis

“We still have 100,000 cases a day. We still have between 1,500 and 3,500 deaths a day,” Walensky said during an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation. “Yet we see some communities loosening some of their mitigation strategies. We are nowhere outside of the forest.”

As the spread of the virus slows in the US and the introduction of the vaccine speeds up, states have begun to relax restrictions. Republican governors in Montana and Iowa lifted statewide mask wear requirements this month. North Dakota’s mask mandate expired in January.

In New York, Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo recently allowed indoor dining at 25% capacity despite the high risk of contagion, and opened stadiums and arenas with limited capacity.

According to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University, the US reports an average of more than 93,000 cases per day, a 22% decrease from the previous week and more than 3,000 deaths per day, an increase of 4% from the previous week.

The daily average of deaths in Covid may have increased over the past week as some states have conducted audits and found previously unreported deaths.

More than 480,000 people in the U.S. have died from the virus and more than 27 million have been infected.

Health experts fear that the rapid spread of more contagious variants could lead to a renewed spike in cases and deaths in the United States. Cases of the contagious variant, first found in the UK and known as B.1.1.7, double roughly every 10 days across the world in land.

“If we loosen these mitigation strategies with increasing communicable variants, we could be in a much more difficult place,” Walensky said. “Now is the time not to let go of our watch. Now is the time to double up.”

Health officials are urging Americans to tighten and double the masks, which offers significant protection against the transmission of viruses. Recent studies by the CDC suggest that firmly worn surgical masks or doubling up with a surgical and cloth mask reduce the risk of transmission by up to 96%.

“We need to get our communities back to normal functioning before we can think about abandoning our mitigation strategies,” said Walensky.