Can we stop wearing masks after being vaccinated?
In some countries, wearing masks against COVID-19 is not mandatory anymore, but can the world follow suit?
21 May 2021- by Pryia Joi
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced in late April (2021) that people who have been fully vaccinated would not need to wear masks any more in most places, except for high-risk areas such as hospitals, nursing homes and on public transport. This change provides an extra incentive for people in the United States to get vaccinated. A few other countries have already gone maskfree, and it is probably one of the things people are looking forward to in a bid to return to normal, but it may not be the right approach for all countries just yet.
MASK-FREE NATIONS
Israel was the first country to lift the mandatory face mask rule, when it achieved low rates of symptomatic COVID-19 disease in April. Around 70% of the population has been vaccinated. Bhutan is also mask-free, after vaccinating 90% of its population in just two weeks.
New Zealand, which has been praised from the start for its rapid and effective response to the pandemic, has stopped the spread of COVID-19 among its population using non-pharmaceutical interventions such as tracking, tracing, and isolation of cases, so no-one has to wear masks anymore. China, one of the worst-hit countries at the start of the pandemic, brought the disease under control, and now masks are not mandatory anymore.
WHEN CAN WE ALL DITCH THE MASKS?
The US CDC justified their decision on a study indicating that healthcare workers at St. Jude’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee who received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine were 75% less likely to have asymptomatic infections. This means that if people have been vaccinated and they are not showing any symptoms of infection, they are much less likely to spread COVID-19 undetected.
However, it's not clear that all other vaccines, used in other countries, work equally well at preventing asymptomatic infections, or that any vaccine would do as well against the virus new variants. In addition, several new variants of SARS-CoV-2 also seem to affect children more than last year, and given that children are not yet vaccinated, and, in many countries, young children don’t have to wear masks, continuing to enforce mask-wearing even in vaccinated adults may be important.
Available in: https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork?gclid=Cj0KCQjwktKFB hCkARIsAJeDT0hnVYDGKpEitbKvsRM0B8DkPUsFqfa7Wz7X35r69mo-6IZclv-wLsaAjGhEALwwcB. Access: 20 May 2020. Adapted.
The author’s point of view regarding the topic under discussion is:
