On Monday, Oregon Health Authority officials announced they would lift all public mask mandates, including in schools, no later than March 31. Oregon has had some of the strictest mask mandates in the nation, and is joined by just eight other states who have some form of a mandate in place at the time this article went to print.
Oregon’s first statewide mask mandate began on July 1, 2020, which expired on June 30, 2021, after the state reached a 70% vaccination rate among adults. In August 13, 2021, a new mask mandate was issued in response to the Delta variant and increased hospitalizations.
State health officials say they’re relaxing mask mandates at the end of March because the latest surge in cases, largely from the Omicron Variant, would stabilize. OHA said they expect that 400 or fewer Oregonians would be hospitalized with COVID-19 by late March.
“The evidence from Oregon and around the country is clear: masks save lives by slowing the spread of COVID-19,” said Dr. Dean Sidelinger, health officer and state epidemiologist, in a press release. “We should see COVID-19 hospitalizations drop by the end of March because so many Oregonians are wearing masks and taking other steps to protect themselves and each other, such as getting a booster shot or vaccinating their children. At that point, it will be safer to lift mask requirements.”
State health officials insist that masking requirements are necessary until late March so COVID hospitalizations can crest and the health care system can avoid the strain of high numbers of severely ill patients. The mandate’s end date was announced the same day OHA filed a rule to require masks in public service that, unlike previous mandates, had no expiration date.
The average number of new cases dropped 40% in Oregon over the past week, according to OHA, but hospitals are still admitting over 1,000 COVID-positive patients a day and 90% of intensive care unit beds and acute care beds are occupied. A model from Oregon Health and Science University predicts hospitalizations will peak at 1,169 daily admissions and decline throughout February and March, though officials urged people to be cautious in the meantime.
“We’re likely to see as many cases on the way down from the Omicron peak as we saw on the way up. That means we need to keep taking steps to prevent more hospitalizations and deaths,” Sidelinger said.
State health officials added that the mask mandate could be lifted earlier than March 31 if hospitalizations decline to what they’re predicted to be at the end of March.
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This article appears in Source Weekly February 3, 2022.
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Fact: Covid transmits through droplets
Fact: Surgical masks help prevent droplet transmission
That’s why surgeons have been using masks for 100+ years. Because they work at preventing droplet transmission particles.
If you’re going to unseat 100+ years of scientific evidence, you will need more than a factless delusional comment from someone with a high school diploma and 30 minutes of Googling under their belt.
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Study after study has shown that cotton and surgical masks do little to stop covid. Finally after 2 years, the supposed experts are admitting to this fact. In addition, they are now telling us that everyone will eventually get covid. So again, why would anyone wear a mask when we will get covid eventually?
These articles always say masks help to slow the spread, but what they fail to explain, is we will get covid. Whether you get covid now or in 2 months makes little difference. The mask mandates should have been repealed long ago. Sadly, the elites in power have had a difficult time relinquishing their power.
Now, a new Johns Hopkins study has shown that lockdowns are inneffective at best. Yet, we continue to act as if they are useful. there has been little to no care about the effects on individuals psychology or the economy. Those in charge should be held to account for their extreme disregard for public health while completely ignoring the science.
What is so disturbing is non-experts in many arenas claiming certain information posted about the whole covid mess is untrue, unless it comes from main stream corporate controlled news. The truth is starting to come out on how they have manipulated the covid scenario to further their own personal & financial agendas. In all of this our 1st amendment rights have been trampled into the ground and trashed by those who claim they are protecting our interests and health by censoring the scientific data that proves otherwise. As to Revert Back, your last paragraph claiming there is 100+ years of scientific evidence that somehow supports the whole of covid disinformation is invalid at best. Read: Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies by Neil Z. Miller, Plague of Corruption(Restoring Faith in the promise of science) by Dr. Judy Mikovits, Dissolving Illusions (Disease, vaccines, and the forgotten history) by Suzanne Humphries, MD, The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, this last book is backed by pages and pages of studies, data and well documented research by scientific experts, highly respected doctors and learned immunologists. That is far more than 30 minutes of googling & supposed delusion. Time to educate yourselves on how we’ve all been played.