New CDC mask guidance due to surge in COVID cases splits Triangle counties – for now

Should vaccinated Triangle residents wear masks indoors? It depends on where you live.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new guidance on mask usage, announced Tuesday, draws a distinction between areas of the country with “high” to “substantial” community transmission and those with “moderate” or “low” community transmission. For the counties on the upper end of that spectrum, the CDC now recommends that even vaccinated individuals don masks in public, indoor spaces to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

The reasoning, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a press conference this week, is that new evidence shows the delta strain of the coronavirus can spread from vaccinated people to others — a distinction not shared by previous variants.

In practice, that creates somewhat of a patchwork of guidance across North Carolina and the Triangle area specifically.

Wake and Chatham counties, under the CDC’s definition, are seeing substantial community transmission. So following the CDC’s guidance would mean wearing masks in those counties and others like Lee, Harnett and Johnston with high levels of community spread.

Across the border in Durham and Orange, transmission of the virus is classified as moderate, a level the CDC calculates based on the total number of new cases and the percentage of positive tests over the past 7 days. Those figures as of July 25 mean that, at least under the letter of the CDC guidance, vaccinated residents don’t yet need to wear masks inside.

But with the virus surging across the country and in North Carolina, some of these designations may change quickly.

Both Wake and Chatham counties went from moderate to substantial community spread just last week, CDC data shows. On Wednesday alone, the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services reported more than 2,600 new COVID-19 cases, about as many as state officials saw in the fall of 2020 — months before vaccines became widely available.

“If you’re not in that high or extreme risk category according to the CDC now, you may well be within the next week,” Dr. Cameron Wolfe, an associate professor at the Duke University School of Medicine, said during a press conference Wednesday. “That’s the kind of acceleration that we’re seeing.”

He’s advising his patients to mask up — regardless of where they live.

“I can give them individual advice as to how immunosuppressed or vaccine responsive they may be,” Wolfe said, “but at the end of the day, sometimes it’s easier just to say, ‘Look, we’re in a very fluid situation here, where rates are increasing, so a mask is a very simple thing that we have learned how to do well over the previous 12 months, and going back to that and adapting as the virus has adapted is actually a pretty standard thing that we should be able to do.’”

The News & Observer’s Richard Stradling contributed reporting.