Infectious Disease Experts Advise Health Care Facilities To Drop Universal Mask Policies
In another sign of changing attitudes to pandemic policy, infectious disease specialists writing in the Annals of Internal Medicine this month argued against the continuation of universal masking policies for doctors, nurses, and other health care workers.
In the article, the eight authors, who are infectious disease specialists associated with Harvard and Washington University medical schools among others, offer a timeline of the evolving responses to the pandemic. The timeline leaves out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) initially confusing advice on masking but acknowledges that factors like the development of immunity, the evolution of the virus, and development of pharmaceutical “countermeasures” have fundamentally reshaped the landscape of the pandemic.
“The burden of SARS-CoV-2 has been mitigated over time,” the authors state, “through access to testing, substantial population-level immunity providing durable protection against severe disease, a series of less virulent variants, and widespread availability of medical countermeasures, which in combination have resulted in decreasing infection mortality rates.”
“Recognizing these changes,” the authors state, “many pandemic interventions have been deimplemented,” but, “Masking requirements and other restrictions remain notable exceptions.”
