CDC: When You’ve Been Fully Vaccinated How to Protect Yourself and Others

CDC har nu redovisat riktlinjer för hur amerikaner kan leva efter vaccinationen:

If you’ve been fully vaccinated:

• You can gather indoors with fully vaccinated people without wearing a mask.
• You can gather indoors with unvaccinated people from one other household (for example, visiting with relatives who all live together) without masks, unless any of those people or anyone they live with has an increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19.
• If you’ve been around someone who has COVID-19, you do not need to stay away from others or get tested unless you have symptoms.
• You should still take steps to protect yourself and others in many situations, like wearing a mask, staying at least 6 feet apart from others, and avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated spaces. Take these precautions whenever you are:

In public

• Gathering with unvaccinated people from more than one other household
• Visiting with an unvaccinated person who is at increased risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19 or who lives with a person at increased risk
• You should still avoid medium or large-sized gatherings.
• You should still delay domestic and international travel. If you do travel, you’ll still need to follow CDC requirements and recommendations.
• You should still watch out for symptoms of COVID-19, especially if you’ve been around someone who is sick. If you have symptoms of COVID-19, you should get tested and stay home and away from other.

CDC

The Virus Spread Where Restaurants Reopened or Mask Mandates Were Absent

Even as officials in Texas and Mississippi lifted statewide mask mandates, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday offered fresh evidence of the importance of face coverings, reporting that mask-wearing mandates were linked to fewer infections with the coronavirus and Covid-19 deaths in counties across the United States.

Federal researchers also found that counties opening restaurants for on-premises dining — indoors or outdoors — saw a rise in daily infections about six weeks later, and an increase in Covid-19 death rates about two months later.

The study does not prove cause and effect, but the findings square with other research showing that masks prevent infection and that indoor spaces foster the spread of the virus through aerosols, tiny respiratory particles that linger in the air.

“You have decreases in cases and deaths when you wear masks, and you have increases in cases and deaths when you have in-person restaurant dining,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said on Friday. “And so we would advocate for policies, certainly while we’re at this plateau of a high number of cases, that would listen to that public health science.”

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Critics slam letter in prestigious journal that downplayed COVID-19 risks to Swedish schoolchildren

But Science has learned that another complaint sent to NEJM makes a more serious allegation: that the authors deliberately left out key data that contradicted their conclusion.

The complaint comes from Bodil Malmberg, a private citizen in Vårgårda, Sweden. She used the country’s open records law to obtain email correspondence between Ludvigsson and Swedish chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, the architect of the country’s pandemic policies, that shed light on how the paper came about.  Malmberg says she requested the emails because the data in the NEJMpaper “did not add up.” 

But the emails obtained by Malmberg show that in July 2020, Ludvigsson wrote to Tegnell that “unfortunately we see a clear indication of excess mortality among children ages 7-16 old, the ages where ‘kids went to school.’” For the years 2015 through 2019, an average of 30.4 children in that age group died in the four spring months; in 2020, 51 children in that age group died, “= excess mortality +68%,” Ludvigsson wrote. The increase could be a fluke, he wrote, especially because the numbers are small. Deaths in 1- to 6-year-olds were below average during the same period, so combining the age groups helped even out the increase, he noted.

It wasn’t clear what caused the jump in mortality in 2020; Ludvigsson asked whether Tegnell could help track down the causes of death, which Ludvigsson said would take too long for him to do because of ethical restrictions. Ludvigsson told Science he and his colleagues still have not been able to determine how most children died in the spring of 2020; he says those data were requested from the National Board of Health and Welfare but aren’t available yet.

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