I have to say - I am not happy about the CDC’s decision to state that fully vaccinated people don’t need to wear masks in most situations indoors or out. In the US 600 people/day are still dying of Covid-19 and our case positivity rate is still above 3% - not to mention most children are still not vaccinated.

Holding off for a few more weeks could have improved things tremendously. The CDC’s decision to lift the mandates seems to be guided by economics rather than science. Zeynep Tufekci’s piece in New York Times

It’s difficult for officials to issue rules as conditions evolve and uncertainty continues. So I hesitate to question the agency’s approach. But it’s not clear whether it was responding to scientific evidence or public clamor to lift state and local mandates, which the C.D.C. said could remain in place.

It might have been better to have kept up indoor mask mandates to help suppress the virus for maybe as little as a few more weeks.

The C.D.C. could have set metrics to measure such progress, saying that guidelines would be maintained until the number of cases or the number vaccinations reached a certain level, determined by epidemiologists.