Wisconsin Residents Should Consider Masking Up For The Holidays: CDC

WISCONSIN — As families and friends in Wisconsin 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.

Wisconsin has long relaxed its mask guidance after a decision by the state's supreme court, and doesn’t require face coverings in public settings (although Milwaukee County Transit System requires masks). However, many states still require masking for people in high-risk settings, like hospitals, doctor’s offices and nursing homes.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services still recommends that people wear masks when dealing with high COVID-19 community levels. A layered prevention strategy combining vaccines, staying home when sick, and wearing a mask when needed can help prevent sickness, authorities said.

The DHS said you should also wear that mask when:

• You are inside in an area with high community spread.
• In health care settings like doctor's offices and hospitals when required by the facility.
• For 10 days if you have been exposed to COVID-19.
• For up to 10 days if you develop symptoms of COVID-19.

The CDC said Milwaukee County is currently at medium spread. Dane County has low community levels while Waukesha County has medium.

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.

With a medium level of COVID-19 community spread, the CDC says people at risk for illness should discuss wearing a mask with their doctor.

“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.

In Wisconsin, 20 people died the week of Nov. 30 from COVID-19. Wisconsin saw a peak in deaths in December of 2020, with over 450 people dying in one week.

Nationally, only about 12.7 percent of the eligible 5 and older population are vaccinated and fully boosted against COVID-19. In Wisconsin the number is higher — about 17.5 percent of people over 5 are vaccinated and boosted.

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

Influenza A activity continues to increase significantly in Wisconsin for the third week in a row with lab-positive rates up to 25 percent, the latest respiratory illness report from the DHS said.

About 56 percent of Americans had gotten their flu shots as of Nov. 19, according to the CDC. In Wisconsin just 30 percent of residents are inoculated.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin RSV activity is decreasing but overall remains high.

Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, peaked early, subsided and is picking up again in some areas, straining capacity in pediatric units across the country.

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.”