Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine claimed Thursday that state residents might have to get used to wearing masks for another year.
Despite promising results for COVID-19 vaccines from pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna, Levine cited the need to ration them in three phases as a reason for extended preventative measures, according to Penn Live.
The first phase includes “front-line health care workers, first responders, the elderly and people living in group health care settings,” Penn Live reported, followed by a second phase for “high-risk people” not in the first phase, with the third phase encompassing the general public.
“We anticipate we’re going to be rolling this out through the winter and then into the spring and into the summer,” Levine told Penn Live. “It could take a significant amount of time to immunize everyone in Pennsylvania. I anticipate we’re going to be wearing masks well into 2021, maybe to the end of 2021.”
Following Levine’s advice, Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf earlier this week instituted an onerous mask mandate in his state that demands Pennsylvanians cover their faces even in their own homes.
As The Daily Wire reported:
On Tuesday, the administration of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf announced a new coronavirus-related crackdown on the citizens of Pennsylvania, which includes a mask mandate for people inside their own homes.
At the behest of Dr. Rachel L. Levine, the Secretary of Health for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, citizens are going to be mandated to mask-up in their homes if people outside of their household are inside.
“Strengthening masking order,” the department posted via Twitter. “Masks are still required. Indoors: masks now required anytime you’re with people outside of your household, even if you’re socially distant. Applies to all indoor facilities + if you have people in your home not part of your household.”
Levine’s prediction about wearing masks to the end of next year has been echoed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who predicted that such measures would be necessary into 2022.
As The Daily Wire reported:
“It’s not going to be the way it was with polio and measles, where you get a vaccine, case closed, it’s done,” Fauci said. “It’s going to be public-health measures that linger for months and months.”
“You’re not going to have a profound degree of herd immunity for a considerable period of time, maybe toward the end of 2021, into 2022,” Fauci continued. “I feel very strongly that we’re going to need to have some degree of public-health measures to continue. Maybe not as stringent as they are right now.”
Fauci drew a distinction between lockdown measures, which he has said he does not believe will have to be implemented again, and preventative measures such as masks and social distancing.
“You can do this without shutting down the country. There’s a misunderstanding,” he said. “You can cautiously and prudently continue to try to open up the country and open the economy.”