Indoor mask mandates are not necessary to be safe now across most of the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.
Highlights
- Most Americans are safe going without a mask in indoor settings, including in schools, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.
- The new guidance puts more than half of the nation’s counties at low or medium risk for Covid, meaning masks are no longer necessary.
- It’s a dramatic shift from the previous guidance, which recommended masks in counties with substantial or high transmission, a category that covered the vast majority of the country.
- But a relaxation of the mask guidance “doesn’t mean that this is the end,” an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H.
- Chan School of Public Health says.
- It may encourage some states or districts that have been reluctant to end mask mandates in schools.