WASHINGTON — Two years into the coronavirus pandemic, Americans who have had a hard time getting their hands on masks and at-home tests are suddenly being showered with offers of freebies — courtesy of taxpayers and the Biden administration, which had come under sharp criticism for not acting sooner.On Wednesday, the administration announced that it would make 400 million nonsurgical N95 masks available free of charge at community health centers and retail pharmacies across the United States. The White House said that to “ensure broad access for all Americans,” there would be a limit of three masks per person.The news came a day after the administration rolled out covidtests.gov, its new website where Americans can order at-home coronavirus tests at no cost.Taken together, the moves represent a stepped-up effort by the White House to combat Omicron, the fast-moving coronavirus variant that first appeared in November and has fueled a spike in cases, hospitalizations and deaths across the country. But some public health experts said that while the efforts were welcome, they were too late.“It will not be as impactful as it would have been had we done it at the beginning of the Omicron surge or the beginning of the Delta surge,” said Julia Raifman, a health law and public policy expert at the Boston University School of Public Health.The White House called the distribution of masks the “largest deployment of personal protective equipment in U.S. history.” Wednesday’s announcement came days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its mask guidance to acknowledge that cloth masks do not offer as much protection as surgical masks or respirators.The N95 masks will come from the Strategic National Stockpile, the nation’s emergency reserve of medical supplies. The stockpile was badly depleted at the outset of the pandemic, leaving health care workers without masks and other personal protective gear essential to fighting the coronavirus. As late as December 2020, the United States was still facing alarming shortages of personal protective gear.The decision to distribute masks from the stockpile to the public is a sharp departure from prior practice; in the past, they were reserved for health care workers.According to the C.D.C.’s new description of masks, well-fitting respirators, including N95s, offer the highest level of protection. Their name refers to their ability to filter out 95 percent of all airborne particles when used correctly.This month, in a series of opinion articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association, six former advisers to President Biden’s transition team called for a new pandemic strategy that would include making N95 masks free and easily available to all Americans, and vastly increasing the number of free coronavirus tests.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Latest Updates
Updated Jan. 19, 2022, 4:42 p.m. ETNew Jersey mandates booster shots for hospital, nursing home and prison employees.Arizona threatens to sue the Biden administration if it withholds pandemic aid over its school mask policies.The Caribbean suffers its steepest known case rise of the pandemic, the W.H.O. says.But Mr. Biden faced challenges, particularly on the testing front. His administration had pledged to ramp up testing capacity but had not done so by the time the Omicron variant emerged. So while he announced shortly before Christmas that his administration would purchase 500 million rapid tests to distribute free to the public, Americans had to wait for them.“They talked a lot about substantially ramping up testing and it didn’t happen,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, adding, “I think that was a real failure of the administration, to not have more tests available by the time we got into the holidays.”ImageN95 respirators, which can filter out 95 percent of all airborne particles when used correctly, were in short supply early in the pandemic.Credit...Brendan Mcdermid/ReutersLast week, Mr. Biden stepped up the testing initiative and announced that his administration would purchase another 500 million tests, bringing the total to one billion. Jeffrey D. Zients, the president’s coronavirus response coordinator, also told reporters last week that the administration was “actively exploring” ways to make high-quality masks available.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to Know
Card 1 of 4Omicron in retreat.Though the U.S. is still facing overwhelmed hospitals and nearly 2,000 Covid-19 deaths a day, encouraging signs are emerging. New cases are plummeting in several parts of the country, and studies continue to suggest that the Omicron variant may be less severe.Free tests and masks.The BidenBy: Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Title: Biden Will Provide 400 Million N95 Masks For Free Starting Next Week
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/health/biden-n95-masks.html
Published Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2022 00:00:29 +0000
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