In March 2022, “the country is currently experiencing about 5 deaths per million people per day from COVID-19” and the total deaths are nearly 1 million — “Unfortunately, the United States has yet to arrive at the next normal.”
NEW YORK, March 9 (Xinhua) — As U.S. states roll back masking requirements for students, a new study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that masks helped cut COVID-19 infections in public K-12 schools that required them in the fall, reported CNN on Tuesday.
Overall, schools that required masks had 23 percent fewer COVID-19 cases on average than those that didn’t. “This is a valuable finding consistent with other past data during the Delta wave,” Kristen Nordlund, a CDC spokesperson, said in an emailed statement, according to the report.
Based on partnership between the CDC and the Arkansas Department of Health, the study looked at COVID-19 infections in Arkansas schools over a period of about seven weeks from August to October 2021, when the Delta variant was the major cause of infections.
The research compared COVID-19 infections in 233 public school districts, over 50 percent of whom imposed mask mandates while 48 percent didn’t. Mask policies had the most effect for older students and in combination with higher vaccination coverage, the report said.
A FEW EXCEPTIONS
Mask mandates have disappeared rapidly in the last few weeks as Omicron cases have receded, but some school districts, cities and one state are holding out, and some teachers, parents and students fear that dropping mask mandates in schools is premature.
As of Monday, Hawaii remains the only U.S. state that is not lifting its statewide indoor mask mandate. About a third of the U.S. school districts still require masks, while from Jan. 7 through Monday, the number of school districts ending mask mandates had doubled.
As Americans enter a new maskless era, “some in the country have welcomed the new guidelines, while others worry that the moves are premature,” reported The New York Times on Tuesday, noting over a third of the country was not fully vaccinated against the coronavirus as of Monday.
Experts have pointed out that while the risk COVID-19 poses to children is real, it is now about the same as the risk of the flu. Many doctors also cite the mental health strain children have faced during the pandemic and the educational value of seeing full faces, said the report.
FAR FROM NORMAL
U.S. mortality rates due to COVID-19 are currently about 10 times higher than had been recorded during previous outbreaks of a major respiratory disease, experts have said, indicating that the country has some distance to go before it returns to a “normal” level of public health.
The current number of deaths still exceeds what would typically be expected in a “bad” flu season. “In that scenario, hospitals would fill, worker shortages would emerge, and more than 50,000 Americans would lose their lives in a year,” reported Business Insider on Wednesday.
Citing a report by a group of the world’s top scientists, public health doctors and policy experts published on Monday, the report said that to reach “the next normal,” the United States should aim for an average mortality of less than 0.5 deaths per million Americans per day.
“Going into March 2022, the country is currently experiencing about 5 deaths per million people per day from COVID-19” and the total deaths are nearly 1 million, said the report, adding that “unfortunately, the United States has yet to arrive at the next normal.”
