NEW YORK (AP) – A new national study adds strong evidence that mask warrants can slow the spread of coronavirus and that allowing meals at restaurants can increase cases and deaths.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched the study on Friday.
“All of this is very consistent,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a White House briefing Friday. “You have a decrease in cases and deaths when you wear masks and you have a decrease in cases and deaths when you eat in a restaurant.”
The study was launched just as some states cancel mask mandates and restaurant limits. Earlier this week, Texas became the largest state to lift its mask, joining a move by many governors to ease COVID-19 restrictions, despite demands from health officials.
“It’s a solid piece of work that strongly supports the fact that mass in person is one of the most important things to deal with if you control the pandemic,” said William Hanage, a Harvard University expert on the dynamics of the disease who was not involved study.
The new research is based on smaller CDC studies, including one that found that people in 10 states who became infected in July were more likely to have eaten at a restaurant, and another who found mask warrants in 10 states. was associated with reductions in hospitalizations.
CDC researchers looked at US counties placed under state-issued mask warrants and counties that allow restaurant meals – both indoors and outdoors. The study looked at data from March to December last year.
Scientists have found that mask mandates are associated with reduced coronavirus transmission and that improvements in new cases and deaths have increased over time.
Reductions in growth rates ranged from half a percentage point to almost 2 percentage points. This may seem small, but the large number of people involved means that the impact increases over time, experts said.
“Every day the growth rate slows, the cumulative effect – in terms of cases and deaths – adds up to be quite substantial,” said Gery Guy Jr., a CDC scientist who was the lead author of the study. .
The opening of the restaurant table was not followed by a significant increase in cases and deaths in the first 40 days after the lifting of the restrictions. But after that, there were increases of about 1 percentage point in the rate of increase in cases and – later – 2 to 3 percentage points in the rate of increase in deaths.
The delay could be due to the fact that the restaurants did not reopen immediately and because many customers would have hesitated to eat immediately after the restrictions were lifted, Guy said.
There is also always a gap between when people get infected and when they get sick, and more until they get to the hospital and die. In the case of meals, a delay in deaths can also be caused by the fact that the diners themselves cannot die, but could become infected and then spread to others who get sick and die, Hanage said.
“What happens in a restaurant does not stay in a restaurant,” he said.
CDC officials have stopped saying that the tables inside should be stopped. But they said that if restaurants open, they should follow as many preventative measures as possible, such as promoting outdoor dining, adequate indoor ventilation, masking employees and calling on customers to wear masks whenever they don’t eat or not. I drink.
The study had limitations. For example, researchers have tried to make calculations that take into account other policies, such as banning mass assemblies or closing bars, which could influence cases and death rates. But the authors acknowledged that they could not explain all the possible influences – such as the reopening of the school.
“It’s always very, very difficult to completely nail causal relationships,” Hanage said. “But when you take this together with all the other things we know about the virus, it supports the message” about the value of wearing a mask and the danger of eating at a restaurant, he added.
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