PA Residents Should Wear Masks For Holidays, CDC Says

PENNSYLVANIA — While it may feel like the pandemic is over, masks should be worn by friends and family gathering this holiday season, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week.

That's because of the "tripledemic" effect of COVID-19, RSV, and seasonal flu cases spiking at the same time, potentially overwhelming the healthcare system. Vaccination rates for these illnesses continue to lag, meaning that masking is one of the best tools to control the spread, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Monday in a call with reporters.

Pennsylvania has relaxed its mask guidance and doesn’t require face coverings in public settings. Masks are still required in parts of Pennsylvania with substantial or high transmission. That's a category that now includes just a single county, Mercer.

Additionally , many states still require masking for people in high-risk settings, 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.”

COVID-19 cases in Pennsylvania have shot up 39 percent in the past two weeks, and currently sit at an average of 1,991 cases per day, according to the New York Times data tracker.

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.

Only about 12.7 percent of the eligible 5 and older population across America are vaccinated and fully boosted against COVID-19. Nearly 8.9 million of Pennsylvania's 12.96 million residents are fully vaccinated, and more than 1.6 million have received a bivalent booster shot.

All but a handful of states reported “high” or “very high” levels of flu for the week ending Nov. 26, according to CDC data. About 56 percent of Americans had gotten their flu shots as of Nov. 19, according to the CDC. In Pennsylvania, 55.6 percent of residents are inoculated.

Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, peaked early, straining capacity in pediatric units across the country. But cases remain high. In Pennsylvania, the number of positive RSV tests hit 5,893 for the first week of December, the most recently tracked data period. That's down from the mid-November peak of 18,438 weekly cases.

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.”