CDC set to recommend masks in COVID hot spots. Will mandates return in Mississippi?
The CDC is reportedly set to recommend that both vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans wear masks indoors in coronavirus hot spots as the more contagious delta variant of COVID-19 spreads.
The Centers for Disease Control wants people who live in areas where transmission rates are at high levels to wear face coverings indoors, and that would include Mississippi.
The state is one of several hot spots that have popped up in recent weeks. State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs tweeted that Mississippi is seeing the sharpest climb in positive tests of the entire pandemic so far.
Almost all of those new cases are the delta variant, which is twice as contagious as the previous strain of COVID-19, he said in a video update Tuesday. Hospitalizations and nursing home outbreaks also are increasing.
The State Department of Health reported 1,291 new cases of COVID-19 and 15 new deaths in the state Tuesday. The number of people hospitalized in Mississippi with confirmed cases surged from 574 to 653 in the span of 24 hours.
Mississippi has lagged much of the nation in vaccination rate, but last week was one of the more productive weeks of the summer with 40,245 shots given.
The health department has not yet encouraged vaccinated people to wear masks again, but it has asked people 65 years and older to avoid mass gatherings indoors.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said in March that he had no intention of enforcing another mask mandate after he lifted his own statewide mandate.
“The governor’s office is getting out of the business of telling people what they can and cannot do,” Reeves said at the time.
However, Mississippi has not made a move similar to that of Texas, whose governor signed a law that prohibited municipal governments from imposing their own mask orders.
That means that there’s a chance that more Mississippi cities could decide to implement their own mask mandates in the weeks ahead.
Jackson, the state’s capitol, continues to enforce its own mask mandate.
The City of Long Beach decided on Monday to require mask wearing inside city buildings regardless of vaccination status, the Sun Herald confirmed on Tuesday through the city clerk’s office.
The CDC’s new advisory would be a reversal after it said in May that vaccinated Americans no longer needed a mask indoors in most situations.
But new cases have been skyrocketing nationwide as the delta variant quickly takes hold in areas with low vaccination rates, like Mississippi where only one in three people are fully vaccinated.
“If all the unvaccinated people were responsible and wore mask indoors, we would not be seeing this surge,” Dr. Ali Khan, a former CDC disease investigator who now is dean of the University of Nebraska’s College of Public Health, told the Associated Press.
This story was originally published July 27, 2021 at 12:46 PM.
