NJ Residents Should Consider Masking Up For The Holidays: CDC

NEW JERSEY — As families and friends in New Jersey gather for the holidays, they may want to put on a mask to control the spread of COVID-19, RSV and seasonal flu, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week.

With the spread of COVID-19, RSV and seasonal flu, along with lagging vaccination rates, masking up is one of the best ways Americans can protect themselves, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, said Monday in a call with reporters.

New Jersey has relaxed its mask guidance and doesn’t require face coverings in public settings. However, many states such as New Jersey strongly recommended masking in crowded indoor settings and required for people over age 2 in "high-risk areas" like hospitals, doctor’s offices and nursing homes.

Mask guidance is based on COVID-19 community levels, and the CDC is considering expanding the dashboard to include seasonal flu and other highly contagious respiratory illnesses to give Americans a clearer picture of when they need to mask up.

"One need not wait on CDC action in order to put a mask on," agency director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Monday in a call with reporters. "We would encourage all of those preventive measures — handwashing, staying home when you’re sick, masking, increased ventilation — during respiratory virus season, but especially in areas of high COVID-19 community levels."

Nationally, COVID-19 rates and hospitalizations ticked up slightly over the last couple of weeks, although the number of people who are dying is down sharply, to 1,780 for the week ended Nov. 30 from the pandemic high of 23,372 deaths for the week ending Jan. 13, 2021.

In New Jersey, 13,060 were reported for the week of Nov. 30, which is significantly lower than in May when there were roughly 35,000 cases reported.

Deaths in New Jersey also remain low at 52 for the week of Nov. 30. This is much lower than a previous peak in January when there were 719 deaths for the week of Jan. 26.

Nationally, only about 12.7 percent of the eligible 5 and older population are vaccinated and fully boosted against COVID-19. In New Jersey, 12.7 percent of the population or just over 1 million are fully vaccinated.

All but a handful of states reported "high" or "very high" levels of flu for the week ending Nov. 26, according to CDC data. In New Jersey, levels are considered "very high."

About 56 percent of Americans had gotten their flu shots as of Nov. 19, according to the CDC. In New Jersey, 66.6 percent of residents are inoculated.

Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, peaked early, subsided and is picking up again, straining capacity in pediatric units across the country. In the Northeast region, the number of positive RSV tests was 7.61 percent for the week of Dec. 3.

Most children get an RSV infection by the time they’re 2, but people can be infected at any age and more than once in a lifetime, according to the CDC.

The symptoms are typically similar to the common cold. But for the extremely young whose lungs aren’t fully developed, the very old and people whose immune systems are compromised, RSV can lead to breathing difficulties.

Masking is still recommended for people using public transportation, or who have weakened immune systems or for other reasons are at heightened risk for severe respiratory illnesses.

Months of hunkering down and avoiding contact with others during the COVID-19 pandemic weakened Americans’ immune systems, according to health experts.

“Public health officials have been bracing for this possibility since early in the pandemic,” Dr. Michael Mina, chief science officer at eMed and one of the nation’s leading epidemiologists, said in a statement to CBS MoneyWatch.

“The recent surges are fully expected ramifications of a new virus that caused massive swings in human behavior,” Mina said. “We know that immunity is working exactly as it was supposed to, and in this case, it means that we drained population-level immunity by not having exposures.”