It’s too early for school boards to lift mask mandates, but they need to plan for it, former FDA commissioner Gottlieb says
Ky. Health News map, based on Ky. Dept. for Public Health data Jan. 15-21. Click on it to enlarge.
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Pediatrician Horace Hambrick attended the Jan.
10 meeting of the Scott County school board
to ask it to keep a mask mandate, which it did.
(Georgetown News-Graphic photo by James Scogin) |
Kentucky Health News
As Kentucky schools wrestle with demands by some parents to lift mask mandates, a physician who headed the Food and Drug Administration for Donald Trump says it’s too early to do that.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb said on CBS‘s “Face the Nation” Sunday that masks are central to school’s plans for preventing spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant, so they should still be required as long as infection levels remain high.
Those counties and their rates, as of Friday, are Carroll, 391; Henderson, 389.3; Harrison, 332.1; Warren, 331.6; Spencer, 330.7; Daviess, 329.5; Henry, 319.8; Muhlenberg, 319.6; Powell, 319; Shelby, 312.1; and Fayette, 303. Kentucky officials say a rate above 25 is high, calling for mask mandates.
In recent weeks, more than a fourth of new coronavirus cases in Kentucky have been among people 18 and younger. Getting infected probably provides “as good if not better” immunity against a particular variant as a vaccine does, but “vaccines provide the broadest possible immunity,” Gottlieb said. “The primary utility of the vaccines is protection against severe disease and hospitalization.”