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In committee meetings during public comment , we hear from certain populations in certain places that may not reflect the majority opinion of healthcare providers across the country . Opinion probably varies a lot by geographic area and by many other factors . That said , I would agree there are some practitioners who are worried about what the guidance will consist of and what the impact of that guidance will be on the way care is provided .”
really understand whether it ’ s going to be truly seasonal or not . And if it is , what is its seasonality going to be like consistently ? The other coronaviruses are not very predictably seasonal and can have non-winter surges as well . So , I think we ’ re still in that learning phase with COVID . I don ’ t think we ’ re all the way into endemic . And while we ’ re clearly not in the worst of the pandemic anymore either , we ’ re sort of in this grey space that makes things challenging .”
Babcock continues , “ I think universal masking was a critical tool that we needed early in the pandemic , as well as for quite a while during the pandemic to be sure that our employees and patients were safe , and that that accessing healthcare was safe . I think universal masking served an important purpose during the time that we used it . But when the levels of COVID infection in the community were lower than flu infections in an off-season when the number of employees and patients who were affected were the lowest that they had been in the last three or four years , we did feel like you could then relax that requirement and say that certainly people can continue to wear
masks , and we made a big point in our healthcare organization -- and I know that many others did as well -- that patients should feel totally comfortable in masks in our setting and should feel totally comfortable asking anyone to wear a mask . All our employees would understand how to respond to that request , and the response to that is ‘ Absolutely , let me put a mask on , no problem .’ I think with all those things in place -- when the risk of getting exposed during a healthcare encounter is very low , then we ’ re using a protective mechanism that we don ’ t need at that time . And it is a burden for healthcare personnel to have to wear them all the time . In our own location we saw an increasing number of people who weren ’ t wearing masks even when they were recommended because they were beginning to see they could go through a week of taking care of patients without having a COVID patient and without being exposed to anything . During the worst of the pandemic , they were wearing a mask for every encounter , all day long , all the time . Now , what they ’ re preventing is rarer . So , I think we tried to say in that Annals paper that this doesn ’ t mean that we would stop
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