New U.S. guidelines allow many Americans to take a break from masks

Most Americans live in places where healthy people, including students in schools, can safely take a break from wearing masks under new U.S. guidelines released Friday.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) outlined the new set of measures for communities where COVID-19 is easing its grip, with less of a focus on positive test results and more on what's happening at hospitals.

The new system greatly changes the look of the CDC's risk map and puts more than 70 per cent of the U.S. population in counties where the coronavirus is posing a low or medium threat to hospitals. Those are the people who can stop wearing masks, the agency said.

The agency is still advising people, including schoolchildren, to wear masks where the risk of COVID-19 is high. That's the situation in about 37 per cent of U.S. counties, where about 28 per cent of Americans live.

The new recommendations do not change the requirement to wear masks on public transportation and indoors in airports, train stations and bus stations.

Closer to home, Canada's chief public health officer, Theresa Tam, said Friday that she hopes Canada is past the pandemic crisis and is now in a transition phase, headed toward recovery.

But she said Canada must be ready to bring some public health measures back if case counts begin to rise sharply again.

In the U.S., the new CDC guidelines for other indoor spaces aren't binding, meaning cities and institutions even in areas of low risk may set their own rules.

And the agency says people with COVID-19 symptoms or who test positive shouldn't stop wearing masks.

But with protection from immunity rising — both from vaccination and infection — the overall risk of severe disease is now generally lower, the CDC said.

"Anybody is certainly welcome to wear a mask at any time if they feel safer wearing a mask," Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC's director, said in a news briefing.

"We want to make sure our hospitals are OK and people are not coming in with severe disease.… Anyone can go to the CDC website, find out the volume of disease in their community and make that decision."

Some states, including Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey, are at low to medium risk while others such as West Virginia, Kentucky, Florida and Arizona still have wide areas at high levels of concern.

CDC's previous transmission-prevention guidance to communities focused on two measures — the rate of new COVID-19 cases and the percentage of positive test results over the previous week.