Vice Mayor Rebecca Kaplan released a statement urging community members to continue wearing masks indoors and around those not in your immediate household. In recent days, there have been changes to the guidance issued by some officials and agencies, regarding the use of masks to help protect public health from the dangers of further spread of COVID.
However, Kaplan along with several public officials and experts caution that the new, looser mask guidance, is NOT based on COVID case rates dropping to the previously recommended and announced levels. Instead, some officials and agencies have simply changed their criteria, in order to remove masking, although the data of transmission levels does not support this change.
Kaplan states: “As someone who is elected to represent the public, and who has been working on COVID issues since the beginning of the pandemic, including launching the nation’s first FEMA-supported large scale COVID vaccination project (headquartered at the Oakland Coliseum, with additional community-based outreach with mobile vaccination sites in hard-hit communities), and as an MIT-trained scientist, I have been following the data and working to help protect the health of our communities.
I began masking around people outside my household, particularly indoors, in the spring of 2020, before health officials and the CDC began recommending it. I began wearing, recommending, and helping to obtain and distribute higher quality masks (such as N95, KN95) long before the CDC recommended them. And now, I will continue to wear a quality mask when indoors around people outside my household, even as some agencies are no longer requiring it. And I encourage the public to do the same.
Continued at Oakland News Online, at this link here.
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