How to Handle COVID Now? Health Leaders Can't Agree on Answer
(CNN) -- At this point in the Covid-19 pandemic, much of the United States has slowly moved away from following or enforcing mitigation measures.
Most public schools plan to keep masks optional this fall. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention no longer recommends staying at least 6 feet away from other people to reduce the risk of exposure.Among public health leaders, there has been growing division around this pivot, and that stems from frustration around how the pandemic has been managed in the United States, said Art Caplan, founding head of the division of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York."This is the most powerful division I can think of among mainstream public health people," Caplan said."By the way, it reinforces something else: It's a division based on ethics.
It's not about science," he added. "It's a fight about, what do you do at this point about Covid? Do you double down and mandate masking and mandate vaccination and insist that for schools to open, they have to improve ventilation and insist on testing?
Or do you just sort of say, 'people are tired. They don't want to do it anymore. We can't make them. We'll have to live with it.' "Since Covid-19 arrived, there has been a constant division among public health experts on what mitigation measures should be in place and how to communicate those measures -- "it's just that the proportion has changed," said Dr.
