With national cases of COVID-19 dropping rapidly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will soon release new guidelines on how states and local governments can relax health restrictions, including wearing masks indoors. According to news reports citing unnamed officials, new guidelines could come as early as next week.
The CDC’s guidelines will arrive well after several states and local governments make plans to repeal pandemic restrictions, especially indoor masking. The moves have cast some doubt as to whether the CDC is once again struggling to keep up with the changing circumstances of the pandemic.
In a news conference last week, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky adhered to current guidelines, noting that “our hospitalizations are still high, our death rates still high.” While the agency was “encouraged” by current downward trends, “we’re not there yet,” said Dr. Walensky on the relaxation of guidance.
At the time, 99.1 percent of U.S. counties had high or substantial levels of virus transmission, necessitating indoor masking, according to current CDC guidelines. While the number of cases continues to fall, transmission levels have changed little since then. Nationally, the average number of new cases per day is still around 140,000, which is not much lower than the peak average of the delta wave. The number of hospital admissions is still high, with a daily average of around 85,000. And daily deaths are still higher than at any point during the delta wave, with the current daily average of about 2,300.
Willing to continue
But in a briefing on Wednesday, Walensky acknowledged the reality “that everyone is out to get out of this pandemic,” as well as the health restrictions that have been put in place over the past two years.
“As we see the omicron wave continue to decline, we know you may have questions about what prevention strategies are really needed right now, especially because people are so eager to get them removed,” she said.
As such, the CDC is working on new statistics to determine when it is safe to relax restrictions in specific areas. While Walensky didn’t explicitly say what those statistics will be, she emphasized that the agency focuses on local levels of serious illness and hospital capacity rather than cases and transmission levels.
“As we consider future statistics, which will be updated shortly, we recognize the importance of not just cases…but critical, medically serious illness leading to hospitalizations,” she said. “We need to view hospital capacity as an extra important barometer. Our hospitals need to be able to accommodate people with heart attacks and strokes. Our emergency departments cannot be so overwhelmed that patients with emerging problems have to wait in line.”
With the new statistics, Walensky said she hopes the updated guidelines will be more flexible in terms of adapting to changing circumstances. “We want to give people a break from things like wearing masks, when these stats are better, and then have the opportunity to reach them again if things get worse,” she said.
