particularly for students and even more so for younger students. let me explain. we ve been talking about this idea for some time. it s now official from the cdc. but they re specifically saying for all students, elementary school students, they can maintain just three feet apart when mask use is universal regardless of what is happening with community transmission. that s for elementary school students. so that s going to be a big deal. but they also say, kate, that for middle school and high school students, they should still maintain at least six feet apart if the community tr transmission in their community is high. so making a difference between older and younger students. for all elementary schools, regardless where you live in the country, guidance is now going to be three feet. but if you happen to live in a community where community transmission is high still, at about 41% roughly of counties in the united states do have high transmission, if you live in one of those
Won t go away? i m going to say a word thatg on. preparedness. we should be in a constant state of preparedness. you used to hear me talk about vigilance. i m not saying to let the vigilance go, but preparedness is where we are right now. and preparedness means that you are using multiple mitigation layers and strategies. you are masking in higher risk situations, that you are being vaccinated and boosted because of the emergence of variants where there is some immunic state, that you have access to antivirals and rapid testing. those strategies are under the banner of preparedness and that is where we have failed the public. we have not told them how to go into their tool kit and which tool to pull out because of the noise of politics. we need to listen to the wisdom of science. listen to the wisdom of science. i can t punctuate that enough. is covid ever going to go away?
Available testing for the entirety of this pandemic, and we still have not done it right. why? right. so i think for many reasons. we ve had a chronically underfunded public health system that was one reason, and we treated testing especially rapid tests as sort of a medical tool when it s a public health tool. it doesn t need to go through the fda and bureaucracy of that sort of approval process. that s one reason. we also don t have a robust testing infrastructure. that speaks to how decentralized our health care system is. we still are behind almost two years out and we know that testing is one of those very important mitigation layers that is needed, because if someone techts positive, then they know to isolate. they know to tell people around them to quarantine. obviously that s not happening, because we don t have that infrastructure in place and people are still waiting three, four, five days to get their pcr results back and that unacceptable. especially if this thing is
Increases your chance of getting infected by five times, getting sick by ten, hospitalize or dying by ten. so before travel, get vaccinated. if you are going to travel, travel to places that have high vaccination rates, low transmission rates and of course, taking all the mitigation layers while you are traveling. masking, keeping a rapid test with, you will really make the holiday travel much safer. should i, if i have relatives in the south, should i just avoid seeing them this holiday season, based on the infection rate? here is where i would say. it is the risk you are willing to take. if everybody who is in your group in the south is vaccinated, and if you are able to take all those layers, get tested, it adds an extra layer of safety, right? the other thing that i will say is, for groups who are not yet vaccinated, with particularly if you have family in the south were not
School? i think, willie, if we want to go back to an environment where people are going indoors, especially where cases are going up, the pathway to get to the point there s safe in-person schooling is to vaccinate as many adults as possible. that way you re reducing the amount of virus in the community that you re in, and then you add extra mitigation layers. i think that s what the cdc guidance was also meant to do, stress vaccination and say in areas you re seeing surges, greater hospitalizations, kids are still part of our communities throughout as they reflected the community transmission. so extra layers could help those schools be safer, particularly when there is greater disease transmission in those communities. so i do agree with the american academy of pediatrics, particularly in those settings.