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Dr. Jha says it’s time for new metrics as we enter the pandemic’s next phase
The physician called the CDC's new mask guidelines “reasonable, well-timed and consistent with the science.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new masking guidelines that put most of the country in counties that don’t need to mask are “reasonable, well-timed and consistent with the science,” wrote Dr. Ashish Jha.
In a Feb. 25 New York Times op-ed, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health expressed his support for the shift away from relying solely on positive test counts to inform public health mandates.
The new guidance, released Feb. 25, categorizes counties as low, medium, or high risk for poor outcomes and recommends universal masking indoors only in high-risk areas. Importantly, Jha said, the new guidance takes into consideration the health care system capacity in determining risk level. Right now, more than 70% of the United States population is in an area with low or medium community risk.
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Though the guidance may feel like a sharp departure from previous policies, Jha wrote the change is “entirely appropriate.”
“A virus and a population interact in a dizzyingly dynamic system, with mutations and layering immunity forming different profiles of population-wide risk at different times,” he wrote. “Policy does and should recognize when these factors have changed enough to justify new approaches.”
Jha also pointed to the omicron variant in justifying the CDC’s changes, saying that the “surge changed everything.”
“Hospital capacity matters enormously,” he wrote, because when hospitals are stretched with COVID-19 patients they can also no longer provide high-quality care for patients with a myriad of other conditions like heart attacks and appendicitis.
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Jha expanded on all these points in his New York Times op-ed.
He warned that this may not spell the forever end of masks for most Americans — mitigation efforts like testing, avoiding gatherings, and masking will still be important to help limit spread, especially if there is a threat of another surge.
“Changing the way we use these tools — when to pull them out and when to put them away — is a critical part of managing a pandemic effectively,” Jha wrote. “The C.D.C.’s new guidance does just that by focusing on the metrics that matter most at this point in the pandemic.”
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