Citing warnings from doctors and other health experts about a rising number of COVID-19 cases, several American institutions are reinstating mask mandates including hospitals, businesses, and schools.
Kaiser Permanente‘s Santa Rosa facilities reimposed mask mandates, as confirmed by CBS13. Sutter Health‘s San Francisco-based locations are bringing back the mandates only for healthcare workers, but said they will be closely monitoring the situation and will update their policies accordingly.
Some Northern California residents interviewed by CBS News are against the mandates, with one saying, “I think it’s more political than anything, just think they’re trying to do what they did in 2020.”
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Mask mandates have also been put in place for all students and employees of Morris Brown College in Atlanta, for employees of Lionsgate headquarters in Los Angeles, for the facilities of the United Health Services in New York, for Auburn Community Hospital in New York, and for Upstate Medical’s Syracuse hospitals in Syracuse, New York, according to Newsweek.
Last week, the Associated Press (AP) wrote a “fact check” of the claim that COVID-19 mask mandates were returning and deemed it false. But the reporter only examined one claim concerning employees of airports and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spokesperson was not true. The AP fact checker did not examine the mandates made by the previously mentioned institutions, and thus their headline “Conspiracy theorist spreads false information about the return of COVID-19 mandates” is itself misinformation. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Kaiser Permanente’s move a full day before the AP fact check.
Here are the facts on false claims circulating online this week:
• The TSA has not announced a return of COVID mask mandates.
• Winning the most counties doesn't mean you win a presidential election.
• Reducing CO2 levels will not destroy the planet.
https://t.co/ATdFgKIQLl— AP Fact Check (@APFactCheck) August 25, 2023
CBS News spoke to Yolo County health official Dr. Aimee Sisson, who warned that the county may instate mask mandates in the winter when rates are usually higher.
Some experts on the other side of the aisle are already criticizing the new mandate wave. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) slammed the trend, saying, “The simple answer to the question being posed by ‘experts’ is no. We will not return to widespread masking or COVID rules.” Clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center Dr. Marc Siegel stated his opposition to universal masking policies to Fox News Digital. While Siegel wears a mask at the medical center he works at, he said the original mandates “did not work” and that “they’ve been studied over and over, and they didn’t decrease spread,” during an appearance on “Fox and Friends” this past Saturday.
The experts are blaming the rise on summer travel and on people staying inside to avoid the heat. The increase in cases is being attributed to the omicron subvariant EG.5, as well as the BA.2.86. World Health Organization (WHO) classified the former as a “variant of interest” in early August.
The New York Times acknowledged that up to 30% of recently reported COVID deaths fall into the category of people who had the virus at the time of death for whom the virus was not the underlying cause of death, according to data released by the CDC. Additionally, the New York Post reported that 99% of the 324 recorded COVID deaths in the week of Aug. 19 did not have COVID listed as the primary cause of death, according to CDC data.
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