CDC says vaccinated children can skip wearing masks at US summer camps

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has loosened its mask guidelines for summer camps, saying vaccinated children can now enjoy camp without the face coverings – and even the unvaccinated kids can go maskless outdoors.

“For camps where everyone is fully vaccinated prior to the start of camp, it is safe to return to full capacity, without masking, and without physical distancing in accordance with CDC’s Interim Public Health Recommendations for Fully Vaccinated People,” the CDC said on its website.

Even for campers who are not yet fully vaccinated, the new guidelines say masks are only necessary indoors.

“In general, people do not need to wear masks when outdoors,” the CDC said, noting that outdoor transmission of Covid-19 is extremely rare.

“However, particularly in areas of substantial to high transmission, people who are not fully vaccinated are encouraged to wear a mask in crowded outdoor settings or during activities that involve sustained close contact with other people who are not fully vaccinated,” the agency cautioned.

The new guidelines are a drastic change from the CDC’s previous ones, which recommended that all children and staff at summer camps wear masks at all times. Some experts had objected to that strict stance, given the low rates of outdoor transmission.

The new rules “are way more reasonable,” paediatrician Dimitri Christakis told The Washington Post.

“It’s just disturbing that they do such a 180 in [a few] weeks, which I think undermines the trust that people have in public health recommendations,” Dr Christakis told the newspaper. “To me, it reiterates what has been disturbing to me about this pandemic from the beginning, which is that kids have been an afterthought.”

The change also reflects the long way the United States has come since last summer. On Memorial Day 2020, the country was still gripped with terror of the deadly coronavirus, which had just killed 100,000 Americans.

Today the death toll is almost six times that number, but vaccines have arrived and new infections per day are plunging. For summer camps, the best news arrived earlier this month, when the Food and Drug Administration authorised Pfizer’s vaccine for children as young as 12. The same authorisation is expected soon for Moderna’s shot.

“We have this whole group of adolescents who by mid- to late summer can be fully vaccinated,” Erin Sauber-Schatz, who leads the CDC’s Community Interventions and Critical Populations Task Force, told the Post. “Camps are at a point where they can offer an opportunity to have a camp setting where everyone is fully vaccinated.”

Dr Dan Diekema, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa, told The New York Times the difference was simple.

“A year ago, we were at the end of the beginning of the pandemic in the US, and now we’re kind of at the beginning of the end,” he said.