The current Covid numbers in Bucks County are worrisome. Yet walking around the stores in Bensalem, outside the few retail employees still wearing them, you’d be hard pressed to find people wearing their masks. If you’re the only person wearing your mask, does it matter? Yes!
The chances of you catching COVID are really high
Up until late February, the CDC based its rankings of a county’s level of risk on the amount of virus spreading there and what portion of lab tests were positive. The new metrics instead focus on the situation in hospitals, how many people are being admitted for COVID-19, and how much capacity is left.
The problem with this is more and more people are testing at home and those testing positive have symptoms mild enough that they never make it to the hospital.
Overnight, the mostly red COVID heat map changed to a mostly green map. This gives the impression that our risk is now lower than before. It’s not.
And that brings us to the BA.5 variant.
The BA.5 COVID Variant
The original Omicron strain was BA.1. It was then followed in the U.S. by BA.2. Now, BA.2 is waning while BA.5 (and BA.4) are on the rise. BA.4 and BA.5 are so similar to each other that you’ll often see public health officials refer to them together as “BA.4/5.”
If you have tested positive for COVID recently, the odds are good that it was BA.5, which is currently, the dominant strain in the U.S. While not that different from the variants that came before it, this new version of COVID is concerning. It can somewhat evade our immunity, but the situation is not as dire as you may have heard.
BA.5 is different enough from the previous strains that your immunity won’t give you perfect protection. However, your immunity albeit from a vaccine or from a previous infection is not useless.
It’s still important to avoid getting infected in the first place.
The facts haven’t changed, masks work
If everyone in a room wears a mask, that room is safer for the unmasked person who happens to be there. But even if you are the only one wearing a mask your mask still protects you.
We can no longer rely on getting protection from others.
While cloth masks provide a small amount of protection. Surgical masks are a little bit better. But the best protection has always been a well-fitted N95 or KN95 mask. You’ll never see me out of the house without a mask.
Many of us are finding out that you can be vaccinated, boosted, and still catch COVID. Yes, your illness is more likely to be less severe than someone who is unvaccinated, who wants to be sick at all?
And when you add in the list of possible complications like long COVID, this should be a no-brainer. Keep your mask on.