With Covid-19 cases ticking upward, the nation’s top health agency kicks the hot potato just a bit further down the road.
T he Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is punting the federal mask mandate for public transportation by another two weeks, reports the Associated Press, citing an anonymous source familiar with the matter. That means the mandate will remain in place until at least May 3, 2022. The mask mandate has been extended a handful of times already since it was first implemented in February 2021. New Covid-19 infections are rising again, especially in the Northeast, due to the highly contagious BA.2 subvariant of omicron, but hospitalizations remain low. Since February, the CDC’s metric for assessing Covid-19 Community Levels has been hospitalization rates. Earlier this week, Dr. Ashish Jha, the new White House Covid czar, told the “Today Show” that he was “not overly concerned right now” but that keeping the federal mask mandate in place was “ absolutely on the table.” Some air travel experts speculate that the CDC’s decision to delay lifting the mandate gives the U.S. time to monitor the situation in the United Kingdom, where airlines ditched mask mandates last month and then had to cancel hundreds of flights due to coronavirus-related staffing shortages.
