After the CDC announced last week that it is safe for fully vaccinated to go maskless in most situations, it sparked a lot of questions and uncertainty with many saying they feel unsafe going without a mask.
While the CDC says the change in guidelines was based on the latest science, some people have pushed back.
Dr. Bob Wachter, Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco says the guidelines make sense, if people follow them correctly.
“If you are vaccinated, life is awfully safe for you,” he said, because the vaccines are highly effective at preventing people from getting seriously sick, and even provides a high level of protection from less severe symptomatic cases.
New studies have shown that the vaccine is also effective at preventing people from spreading the virus, and this growing body of evidence all supports the CDC’s decision.
“If we could have come up with guidelines and figured out a way of enforcing them so that vaccinated people could be unmasked inside but unvaccinated people wore their masks inside – because they are not protected at all – that would have been fine,” said Dr. Wachter. “The problem is this is the real world.”
As fully vaccinated people begin to go without masks, that may encourage even the unvaccinated to feel safe enough to stop wearing masks themselves, putting themselves at risk.
And some people may simply pretend to be vaccinated in order to skirt mask requirements.
“The guidelines as they are written are perfectly sane… but how confident can we be that everybody’s going to follow the honor system and everything’s going to work out? The answer is not very confident. So we have to plan for the high likelihood that there are going to be a fair number of unvaccinated people who are still at risk of getting the virus and spreading the virus mingling in a crowd of people.”
In California, officials have said that indoor mask rules will not be relaxed until June 15, giving time for the state to prepare for the shift.
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