If there’s a time to remove masks, ‘it’s now’ says Mercer Island MD
Feb 21, 2022, 10:29 AM
The masks are coming off. The outdoor mask mandate in Washington has been lifted as of Feb. 18, and the statewide indoor mask mandate is set to end March 21.
Washington state to end indoor mask mandate on March 21
“There’s no question that we have had the surge of omicron, it has now passed, and it is trending down,” , MD, told Seattle’s Morning News. “So if there’s a time to start removing the masks, it’s now.”
“There are some estimates that 60% of the United States population has already been infected with COVID, with one variant or another,” he added. “Omicron, as we know, is highly transmissible — it’s four times more transmissible than the delta variant, so a lot more people got infected; people weren’t nearly as sick.”
There is more herd immunity too, Cohen says, that has been developed as a result of omicron and more people getting infected, in addition to the immunity from vaccinations and earlier variant infections.
“Having said that, at this point, it’s unclear what benefit the masks might actually have in terms of a positive effect,” he said. “So I think, on balance, it’s the right thing to do.”
Long COVID
成人X站 Newsradio’s Dave Ross thinks he’ll probably keep wearing a mask, because the more he reads about the long-term effects of COVID, even in non-hospitalized cases, the more worried he gets.
There have been studies to show that even if you don’t have a severe case of COVID, you can still have lingering health effects, which Dr. Cohen says has been more of a discussion lately now that there are some people who are, essentially, two years out from the initial infections.
“There was a study published in Nature Genetics, a leading journal, that showed that there were a group of people who had ongoing loss of smell and ongoing loss of taste, even to the point that some people were unable to eat food because it tasted so bad, and required placement of a surgical gastrostomy tube, or tube into the stomach, so they could get tube feeds,” he said.
“So that shows how severe some of these long-term problems can be,” he added.
Other people have reported problems with cognition, dizziness, or muscle aches and pains.
“This is a real phenomenon, but it may be there there is a genetic predisposition to having the symptoms of long COVID,” Cohen noted. “The problem is those genetics haven’t been worked out yet, so for any given individual, at this point, there’s nothing to predict whether you will have it or not.”
He says it will take some time to figure out the causes of long COVID, what all the various ongoing symptoms are, and how to deal with it.
Long-term effects are also not unique to COVID.
“There are long-term consequences of some infections,” Dr. Cohen said. “For example, there’s a bacterial infection, a common bacteria, strep — you hear about people getting strep throat, and strep this, and strep that, but strep can actually cause an infection that when the body fights it off, ends up injuring the kidneys. So it’s not surprising that a virus can cause long-term problems.”
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