Medical workers treating patients with Covid-19 at the Brooklyn Hospital Center in January 2022, when the Omicron wave was in full force.
On March 28, 2020, as COVID-19 cases began to shut down public life in much of the United States, then-Surgeon General Jerome Adams issued an advisory on Twitter: The general public should not wear masks. โThere is scant or conflicting evidence they benefit individual wearers in a meaningful way,โ he wrote.
Adamsโ advice was in line with messages from other US officials and the World Health Organization. Days later, though, US public health leaders shifted course. Mask-wearing was soon a pandemic-control strategy worldwide, but whether this strategy succeeded is now a matter of heated debateโparticularly after a major new analysis, released in January, seemed to conclude that masks remain an unproven strategy for curbing transmission of COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses.
โThereโs still no evidence that masks are effective during a pandemic,โ the studyโs lead author, physician, and epidemiologist Tom Jefferson, recently told an interviewer.
Elementary school students returning to in-person learning in a school in California in 2021. Education deficits were equivalent to about 35 percent of a school year and remained steady, according to a new study.