Illinois Residents Should Consider Masking Up For The Holidays: CDC

ILLINOIS — As families and friends in Illinois prepare to 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.

Illinois 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. In Illinois, 10 months have passed since Gov. J.B. Pritzker lifted statewide mask mandates as COVID-19 cases began to drop.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot also lifted the city’s mask mandate the same day. However, it wasn’t until Oct. 17 when Pritzker lifted the mandate for healthcare settings and doctor’s offices. Some offices continue to recommend face coverings, which are also recommended for areas where people are at higher risk for COVID-19.

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,” agency director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Monday in a call with reporters. “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 ended Nov. 30 from the pandemic high of 23,372 deaths for the week ending Jan. 13, 2021.

Last week in Illinois, state health officials said that 63 counties around the state are at elevated COVID-19 community rate levels. The jump in counties was up from 46 the previous week. As of Dec. 2, 46 Illinois counties are at the medium level and 12 are at the high community level, health officials said.

Last week, the state reported 20,495 confirmed or probable cases of COVID-19 and 56 COVID-19-related deaths, according to IDPH officials.

Nationally, only about 12.7 percent of the eligible 5 and older population are vaccinated and fully boosted against COVID-19. In Illinois, 78 percent of residents have gotten at least one dose of the vaccines while 70 percent have completed their full series of shots, health officials said.

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 Illinois last week, 30.2 percent (2,030 of 6,726) of tests for the flu came back positive, according to the department of public health.

About 56 percent of Americans had gotten their flu shots as of Nov. 19, according to the CDC. In Illinois, 42.8 percent of residents are inoculated as of Nov. 19, federal health officials reported.

Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, peaked early, subsided, and is picking up again, straining capacity in pediatric units across the country. In the Midwest, 12.7 percent of antigen tests came back positive for RSV last week while 10.5 percent of PCR tests came back positive.

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, 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.”