NEW YORK (AP) – A new national study adds solid evidence that mask mandates can slow the spread of coronavirus and that allowing food in restaurants can increase cases and deaths.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the study on Friday.
“All of this is very consistent,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a White House briefing on Friday. “You have decreases in cases and deaths when you wear masks and you increase in cases and deaths when you eat at a personal restaurant.”
The study was published just as some states are canceling mask mandates and restaurant limits. Earlier this week, Texas became the largest state to lift the mask rule and joined a move by many governors to relax COVID-19 restrictions despite requests from health officials.
“It’s solid work that makes eating in person one of the most important things to control if you want to control the pandemic,” said William Hanage, an expert in disease dynamics who did not participate in the study.
The new research is based on smaller CDC studies, including one that found that people in 10 states who became infected in July were more likely to have dined at a restaurant and another that found that masks mandates in 10 states were associated with hospitalization reductions.
CDC investigators examined U.S. counties under state-issued mask warrants and counties that allowed food in the restaurant, both inside and outside tables. The study examined data from March to December last year.
The scientists found that the mandates of the masks were associated with a reduction in coronavirus transmission and that improvements in new cases and deaths increased over time.
Growth rate reductions ranged from half a percentage point to almost 2 percentage points. It may seem small, but the large number of people involved causes the impact to grow over time, experts said.
What happens in a restaurant does not stay in a restaurant.
–William Hanage, an expert in disease dynamics at Harvard University
“Every day that the pace of growth slows, the cumulative effect – in terms of cases and deaths – adds up quite a bit,” said Gery Guy Jr., a CDC scientist who was the lead author of the study.
The reopening of the restaurants was not followed by a significant increase in cases and deaths in the first 40 days after the restrictions were lifted. But after that, there were increases of about one percentage point in the growth rate of cases and subsequently 2 to 3 percentage points in the growth rate of deaths.
The delay could be because the restaurants did not reopen immediately and because many customers may have hesitated to dine right after the restrictions were lifted, Guy said.
Also, there is always a lag between when people get infected and when they get sick and more so when they end up in the hospital and die. In the case of eating out, there can also be a delay in deaths because the diners themselves cannot die, but they could become infected and then transmit it to others who get sick and die, Hanage said. .
“What happens in a restaurant doesn’t stay in a restaurant,” he said.
CDC officials stopped saying local restaurants need to be stopped. But they said if restaurants open, they should follow as many preventative measures as possible, such as promoting outdoor dining, having adequate indoor ventilation, masking employees and calling on customers to put on masks whenever they don’t. mengin ni beguin.
The study had limitations. For example, researchers tried to make calculations that took into account other policies, such as bans on mass meetings or bar closures, that could influence the rate of cases and mortality. But the authors acknowledged that they could not explain all possible influences, such as the reopening of the school.
“It’s always very, very hard to dig deep into causal relationships,” Hanage said. “But when you take this together with all the other things we know about the virus, it supports the message” of the value of wearing masks and the danger of eating at the restaurant, he added.
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