The Center for Disease Control and Prevention now says 90% of counties in America meet its requirement for an indoor mask mandate.
The CDC recommended on July 27 that everyone — regardless of their vaccination status — wear masks indoors if they live in an area with a "substantial [or] high" transmission rate.
According to CNBC, “there have been “132,384 new cases of Covid on Wednesday, reaching a seven-day average of about 113,000 cases per day, jumping almost 24% from the prior week. Hospital admissions have similarly climbed by about 31% over the previous week to about 9,700 per day.”
At a briefing on Thursday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC, said, “We continue to see cases, hospitalizations and deaths increase across the country. And now, over 90% of counties in the United States are experiencing substantial or high transmission ... As we have been saying, by far, those at highest risk remain people who have not yet been vaccinated.”
Several states mandate masks for indoor spaces, including Oregon, Louisiana, Nevada, and Hawaii. In other parts of the country, some major cities, like Washington D.C. and Los Angeles, reintroduced indoor mask mandates. Several private companies are also adopting the CDC’s recommendation as policy.
Last week, “JPMorgan said it once again will require all employees, vaccinated or not, to wear masks at its offices nationwide as the spread of the Delta variant upends companies’ plans to return to normal routines,” says The New York Post.
“An area’s level of virus transmissibility depends on two factors: the average number of cases relative to a county’s population and the Covid test positivity rate. The CDC recommends people wear masks indoors in counties that either average 50 or more cases per 100,000 residents or have a test positivity rate equal to or greater than 8 percent,” reports NBC News.
Currently, the CDC’s COVID-19 tracker indicates that Nebraska has the most counties with ‘low’ transmission rates.
