Florida Residents Should Consider Masking Up For The Holidays: CDC

FLORIDA — As families and friends in Florida gather for the holidays, they may want to put on a mask to control the spread of COVID-19, RSV and seasonal flu, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week.

With the spread of COVID-19, RSV and seasonal flu, along with lagging vaccination rates, masking up is one of the best ways Americans can protect themselves, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, said Monday in a call with reporters.

Florida has relaxed its mask guidance and doesn’t require face coverings in public settings. However, many states still require masking for people in high-risk settings, like hospitals, doctor’s offices and nursing homes.

Florida recommends but has not required face coverings for the general public. Several cities and large counties, including Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Hillsborough (which includes Tampa), had mask requirements, but Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order on May 3, 2021, that barred local governments and school systems from imposing COVID-19 restrictions, including mask rules.

Mask guidance is based on COVID-19 community levels, and the CDC is considering expanding the dashboard to include seasonal flu and other highly contagious respiratory illnesses to give Americans a clearer picture of when they need to mask up.

“One need not wait on CDC action in order to put a mask on,” Walensky said. “We would encourage all of those preventive measures — handwashing, staying home when you’re sick, masking, increased ventilation — during respiratory virus season, but especially in areas of high COVID-19 community levels.”

Nationally, COVID-19 rates and hospitalizations ticked up slightly over the last couple of weeks, although the number of people who are dying is down sharply, to 1,780 for the week ending Nov. 30 from the pandemic high of 23,372 deaths for the week ending Jan. 13, 2021.

In Florida, there were 34 deaths from Nov. 25 to Dec. 1, for a total of 83,201 deaths since the pandemic was declared in 2020.

Nationally, only about 12.7 percent of the eligible 5 and older population are vaccinated and fully boosted against COVID-19. In Florida, the percentage is substantially higher. According to the Florida Department of Health, 72 percent of eligible Floridians are vaccinated, for a total of 16,081,610 out of a population of 22,207,477.

All but a handful of states reported “high” or “very high” levels of flu for the week ending Nov. 26, according to CDC data. In Florida, the incidence of flu cases is "high."

About 56 percent of Americans had gotten their flu shots as of Nov. 19, according to the CDC. In Florida, 57 percent of residents are inoculated.

Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, peaked early, subsided and is picking up again, straining capacity in pediatric units across the country. In the most recent reporting week in Florida, the Department of Health said there were 20 positive RSV tests results.

Most children get an RSV infection by the time they’re 2, but people can be infected at any age and more than once in a lifetime, according to the CDC.

The symptoms are typically similar to the common cold. But for the extremely young whose lungs aren’t fully developed, the very old and people whose immune systems are compromised, RSV can lead to breathing difficulties.

Masking is still recommended for people using public transportation, or who have weakened immune systems or for other reasons are at heightened risk for severe respiratory illnesses.

Months of hunkering down and avoiding contact with others during the COVID-19 pandemic weakened Americans’ immune systems, according to health experts.

“Public health officials have been bracing for this possibility since early in the pandemic,” Dr. Michael Mina, chief science officer at eMed and one of the nation’s leading epidemiologists, said in a statement to CBS MoneyWatch.

“The recent surges are fully expected ramifications of a new virus that caused massive swings in human behavior,” Mina said. “We know that immunity is working exactly as it was supposed to, and in this case, it means that we drained population-level immunity by not having exposures.”