CDC Says to Mask in Public, Even as ‘Tridemic’ ER Crisis Slows
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID guidelines have not changed for weeks. The guidelines recommend that everyone wear high-quality masks whenever they are in public places and be fully vaccinated and boosted with the latest bivalent booster shot.
If you weren’t aware that the CDC still recommends high-quality masks in public spaces—even for vaccinated people—that’s not a surprise. Health leadership continues to lag in its efforts to communicate to the general public what it should be doing, even misinformation keeps flooding social media.
Good communications would remind people that there’s still a respiratory infection that’s killing more people each week than died in the attacks of 9/11 in 2001 or at Pearl Harbor in 1941. It’s probably a lack of political will to tell people—tired of masks, exhausted by risk mitigation rules, and bombarded by messages that say the pandemic’s over, if it ever existed—that they have to keep trying to stop the spread of COVID-19.
President Joe Biden’s COVID response coordinator from 2021 through April 2022, Jeff Zients, was tapped to replace Ron Klain as White House chief of staff. Weekly COVID-19 deaths were 21,574 when Biden took office in 2021 and fell to 2,937 at the end of April 2022, so Zients presided over a huge decrease—the growth of vaccine availability helped a lot.
Since Zients left his COVID-19 post, it has kept killing—about a thousand more people each week now than when he left the response coordinator role. Maybe he’ll remind the president that coronavirus is still out there and still deadly.
Almost two years ago, leadership expert Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic said in a Forbes article: “In a logical world, we would not have needed a global pandemic to realize that people are generally better off when their leaders are smart rather than stupid, curious rather than narrow minded, humble rather than arrogant, kind rather than evil, resilient rather than anxious, and honest rather than corrupt. But in our world, we did.”
Let’s hope this new White House leadership remembers that hard-earned lesson.
News worth noting
While the number of emergency room visits due to one of the “Tridemic” respiratory illnesses (COVID-19, Respiratory Syncytial Virus and influenza) has declined since Christmas, those three illnesses are still responsible for 10.4% of all ER visits, according to the latest data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, dated Jan. 14. New COVID-19 deaths for the week ended Jan. 18 totaled 3,953, down slightly from the 4,209 deaths the week of Jan. 11, but still higher than any other week since March 30, 2022.
Amanda Schleede is founder and CEO of Attend Safe, which helps people attend to life with safe, secure and sensible protocols. Her leadership allows important events to proceed with safety-conscious protections. With Tuesday Tutor, she hopes others will benefit from her experience. Visit Attend Safe online at AttendSafe.com.