Tags: Pandemic
Cheryl Bettigole, Philadelphia Health Commissioner: “So today I’m announcing that we have reached the threshold for moving out of the all-clear COVID response level and into the mask precautions level. Simply put, that means that we’re reintroducing the mask mandate in Philadelphia. We’ll have a one week education period to allow time for us to get the word out. We hope that by having folks mask up whenever they’re in public indoor spaces, we can get ahead of the wave and keep it from reaching a peak like we saw in January with the omicron variant. If we can do that, we can literally save the lives of vulnerable Philadelphians.”
“We don’t know at the BA2 variant in Philadelphia will have the kind of impact on hospitalizations and deaths that we saw with the original on the omicron variant this winter. I suspect that this wave will be smaller than the one we saw in January. But if we wait to find out to put our masks back on, we’ll have lost our chance to stop the wave. We mask up now and find out that hospitalizations don’t increase in the US in response to this variant, the way they have in the UK, great. We can then take off our masks with a sense of relief. But if we fail to act now, knowing that every previous wave of infections has been followed by a wave of hospitalizations and then a wave of deaths, it will be too late for many of our residents.”
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