With COVID cases and hospitalizations climbing, UMass Memorial is bringing back a mask mandate for staff when interacting with patients.
“We have continued to see a dramatic increase in the number of COVID-19 positive employees over the past two weeks, which has led to exposures of both fellow caregivers and patients,” a memo sent to staff on Thursday stated. “In response to this, as a protective measure for our staff and patients, effective immediately we are requiring mandatory caregiver masking for all patient encounters in all licensed clinical areas.”
The Worcester hospital says that if the trend continues, it may need to require masks for anyone who enters the building. They will re-evaluate the mandate in four weeks, “unless worsening conditions dictate otherwise.”
Nationwide, the CDC says new hospitalizations jumped 21.6% in the past week. The agency is also tracking a new, highly mutated COVID variant called BA.2.86 that experts think might fuel further spread.
I would also comment that a lot of this is probably a facility-specific artifact. The Massachusetts hospital where I work had a similar Covid outbreak among staff about a month ago, and we started masking up again as a result. It didn’t get any worse and we’re already back to not masking routinely.
Employees share breakrooms, computer stations, and often socialize together outside work. But the overall Massachusetts data like the Boston wastewater testing doesn’t look like any major outbreak is happening: https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm
But a big hospital like UMass or MGH has a problem and it makes the news ¯\_(ツ)_/¯