Yesterday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally updated its guidance on mask-wearing outdoors. Unless you’re at a crowded event, the CDC advises that you don’t have to wear masks outdoors.
This is bringing our most important public-health body up to date with science from exactly a year ago. While states such as California were still arresting people for paddleboarding by themselves in the ocean in the name of public health, a small mountain of scientific evidence was piling up that COVID-19 does not transmit outdoors and that it does transmit among people who are sedentary and have a vitamin D deficiency. In most places in the United States, this led people to not ever wear their masks outdoors. But major urban centers developed a norm of constant outdoor mask-wearing, even as masks came off in indoor-dining situations. Only now, with the overwhelming majority of the vulnerable population vaccinated, has respectable liberal opinion started to nudge public-health authorities to make official what anyone following the scientific consensus already knew.
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