The Los Angeles Post

NURSES UNION TO BIDEN OFFICIALS: TIGHTEN COVID RESTRICTIONS

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The country’s largest union of registered nurses called on the Biden administration to take action against rising COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations amid the surge of immune-evasive Omicron subvariant BA.5 in a letter on Wednesday, the day before President Biden tested positive for the coronavirus.

  • In their letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Nurses United (NNU) critiqued the agency’s standards on masking and quarantining, calling the current guidelines “ insufficient to prevent transmission of Covid-19.”
  • The latest CDC recommendations, NNU contends, tell Americans to mask up too late and leave quarantine too early — missteps they say “will prolong the pandemic.”

A CDC metric that suggests indoor masking only when risk levels in a community reach a “high” point skips critical preventative windows, when risks are lower, the nurses said.

 

“Waiting until hospitalizations are increasing before recommending universal masking indoors in public means that the opportunity to prevent those hospitalizations was missed.”