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 Her comments follow announcements by officials in New Jersey,
Connecticut, Delaware, California and Oregon that they plan to lift
indoor mask mandates for K-12 public schools and other indoor spaces
in coming weeks, seeking a return to normalcy as infections spurred
by the Omicron variant of the coronavirus ebb.
"I know people are interested in taking masks off. I too am
interested. That would be one marker that we have much of the
pandemic behind us," Walenksy said in an interview.
“Right now our CDC guidance has not changed ... We continue to
endorse universal masking in schools.”
Walensky said the CDC has always acknowledged that state and local
jurisdictions are responsible for masking policies, but the agency's
guidance remains unchanged.
"We have and continue to recommend masking in areas of high and
substantial transmission - that is essentially everywhere in the
country in public indoor settings," she said.
She sees the health crisis becoming endemic when infections are at a
steady state and the virus is no longer disruptive to society.
And while Walensky said she is “cautiously optimistic” COVID-19
cases in the United States will fall below crisis levels, "I don't
think we're there right now."
Even with declines in infections from recent record highs, Walensky
noted that the United States is still seeing around 290,000 COVID-19
cases each day and higher rates of hospitalization than it did
during the peak of cases caused by the Delta variant in 2021.
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 Hospital capacity is “one of the most important
barometers” for whether COVID-19 should be
considered a pandemic-level public health
crisis, Walensky said. Right now, U.S. hospitals
remain “overwhelmed” by COVID-19 cases, she
added.
A sign the virus has become endemic, she said, is when "anybody
walking in the door who'd come in for a heart attack or a stroke or
a motor vehicle accident could quickly get care because hospitals
weren't overburdened or overwhelmed."
As the pandemic recedes, monitoring cases will remain important, as
will testing for levels of virus in municipal wastewater, a program
the CDC has recently expanded.
"We can see rises in cases in wastewater signals four to six days
before we ever see rising cases," she said.
Case counts and wastewater data will be used as early warning
signals that a surge is coming and that people should resume COVID
precautions, such as getting boosted or covering faces indoors, she
said.
Preparing for some semblance of normal life with COVID represents "a
lot of the work that we have ahead as we work to come out of this
crisis time."
(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen and Carl O'Donnell; Editing by Bill
Berkrot)
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