A year ago, it was nearly impossible to open Facebook FB, +0.63%, Twitter TWTR, -0.45% or Instagram without seeing photos and posts begging you to stay home and wear a mask in public.
Nowadays the social-media platforms are filled with vaccine selfies, family reunions and information on how to get a vaccine appointment since everyone in the U.S. above 16-years-old is eligible.
Hovering over all of this are questions such as: “If I am fully vaccinated why do I still need to wear a mask?”
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, responded to one such tweet:
CDC guidance for people who are fully vaccinated, meaning they received their final vaccine dose at least two weeks ago, is that they do not need to wear a mask indoors when socializing in small groups among other people who have also been fully vaccinated.
Additionally, fully vaccinated people can visit an unvaccinated household “without masks or staying 6 feet apart, unless any of those people or anyone they live with has an increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19,” according to the CDC guidance.
The risk of spreading COVID in either of those scenarios is relatively low, according to the CDC and infectious-disease experts.
But things become dicier indoors where the risk of spreading and contracting coronavirus is considerably higher than outside where potentially viral-containing droplets have more room to disperse.
“ ‘Being outside doesn’t magically make that risk go away.’ ”
Still, “being outside doesn’t magically make that risk go away,” said Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California San Francisco.
“Fully vaccinated people can still carry the virus, but are very unlikely to get sick from it,” Dr. Victoria Ward, a clinical professor at Stanford University and pediatrician, told MarketWatch.
“Overall, the risk of transmission outdoors from fully vaccinated people is extremely low. It is certainly not zero, but it is low enough that the benefits of easing the mandate outweigh the risks from a public health perspective,” she added.
“ ‘Fully vaccinated people can still carry the virus, but are very unlikely to get sick from it.’ ”
Given that more than 70% of the total U.S. population is not yet fully vaccinated, it’s important to keep mask-wearing the “social norm” in places like supermarkets, hair salons and airplanes, Rutherford said.
So if not now, when?
When least 60% of the population is fully vaccinated, at which point we’d be “approaching herd immunity,” states and cities could safely consider lifting mask mandates he said.
But that likely won’t occur until children and adolescents can get vaccinated.
The Food and Drug Administration is currently considering Pfizer’s PFE, +0.05% request to expand emergency-use authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine to include teens between the ages of 12 and 15.
Rutherford expects the agency to approve the request “in the next couple of weeks.”
13 states have lifted mask mandates
Already 13 states, including Texas and New Hampshire, have lifted their state-wide mask mandates.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, lifted the state’s mask mandate in early March against advice from leading infectious disease experts as well as President Joe Biden who labeled the move “a big mistake” that reflected “Neanderthal thinking.”
The state hasn’t seen a considerable rise in the number of new COVID-19 cases since the mask mandate was lifted, according to data published by the Texas Department of State Health Services.
“ ‘The best way to be able to forget about masks is to get more people vaccinated’ ”
That doesn’t mean it’s safe to start ditching masks completely, Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a spokesman for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said.
“Just because there isn’t a mask mandate doesn’t mean people aren’t wearing masks,” he said.
On top of voluntary mask-wearing it’s likely that many people in Texas, which has the third-highest number of deaths from coronavirus across all states, have developed “natural immunity” in addition to “vaccine-induced immunity,” Adalja told MarketWatch.
Theoretically, Adalja said it would be an “acceptable risk” to let vaccinated people forgo masks, but said it’s not “operationally possible” to separate vaccinated people from unvaccinated people to minimize the risk of spreading COVID.
Of the 55.7 million Americans who’ve been fully vaccinated, some 67% are white and non-Hispanic, as of Monday according to CDC data.
“The best way to be able to forget about masks,” Adalja said, “is to get more people vaccinated.”
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