On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront,” Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Dr. Amesh Adalja said it “always seemed a little bit paradoxical” to have mask mandates on transit while everything else didn’t have one and pushed back on criticism of the court ruling striking down the mandate from White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha by saying it’s not clear what would have changed in the 15 days between the ruling and when the mandate was set to expire.
Adalja stated that “people are doing many things without a mask mandate that are much higher risk than riding on an airplane with highly-filtered air or the transient time they spend on public transportation. People are going to bars, to restaurants, to concerts, gathering with their friends. That’s more of a risk. So, this always seemed a little bit paradoxical to me that this was one place where the mask mandate from the federal government stayed in place where everything else was mask-free.”
He added, “For me, the off-ramps are really tied to metrics regarding hospital capacity. If we’re worried about hospitals getting inundated like they did so many times in the earlier days of this pandemic, then I think there is a root — there’s a lot of impetus for having these types of requirements in place. But when you see a decoupling of cases from hospitalizations, and that’s already what’s happened in the United States…that’s exactly where we want to be with this virus. Because it’s not going to be eradicated. It’s not going to be eliminated. We’re not going to magically jump back to 2019 to be the post-pandemic world. We’re always going to have some baseline number of cases, but if we’re able to manage this with vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, antivirals, rapid tests, then I think you don’t need those kind of government mandates and you can have recommendations, like the CDC issues recommendations for many different infectious diseases, rather than government-issued edicts, which, I think, are often very politicized and often get people to not comply, because it’s coming from the government.”
Adalja then commented on Jha’s statement, saying, “I don’t necessarily think he’s wrong, but it’s unclear to me what would have changed in 15 days. We know that BA.2 is going to continue to increase, that we’ll see cases go up. But it’s unlikely to see our hospitals get into any kind of problem within 15 days. Because of that decoupling that we talked about. So, I’m not sure what they were trying to answer in those 15 days. Maybe they were trying to buy some time, but I don’t think it really makes that much of a difference whether the mask mandate was lifted yesterday or if it’s lifted on May 3, as it was scheduled.”
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