New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is urging Big Apple residents to wear two masks instead of one to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 as new variants of the coronavirus circulating in the United States are reportedly more contagious than the original.
De Blasio’s Health Department has adopted the policy of recommending double-masking just days after the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance.
‘We know that even as the vaccine is here, the need to keep wearing a mask is paramount, it’s crucial,’ the mayor said.
‘It’s amazing of how all the things that we’ve learned in this crisis, maybe the most profound is the power of a mask.’
It comes after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned that the variant could become dominant in the US by March. But one expert isn t convinced it will trigger a case surge.
Of more than 13.7 million coronavirus vaccine doses administered between mid-December 2020 and mid-January 2021, there were 6,994 reports of adverse events submitted to the CDC s reporting system.
A leading Chinese COVID-19 expert has demanded the United States invite the World Health Organization (WHO) to its biological warfare laboratories to trace the source of the coronavirus pandemic. The United States must be the focus of the focus in the origin-tracing works of the novel coronavirus, said Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist of the Chinese CDC.
Mr Zeng s statement gave a fresh push to Beijing s unproven claims that the global health crisis started outside China. Communist officials have repeatedly promoted a conspiracy theory that links the origins of COVID-19 to a US army laboratory.
Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist of the Chinese CDC, has indicated that COVID-19 could have come from the US. The picture shows Mr Zeng talking to state media in a separate interview
A new CDC report released on Thursday found that life expectancy in the U.S. fell a full year from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77.8 years in the first half of 2020, the lowest level since 2006.