What is important at this stage of the Covid-19 pandemic? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Are you still wearing a mask? Keeping your distance from others or avoiding crowds? Rates of Covid infection remain high, and hospitalizations and deaths are more or less steady. Stuart Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins, says although practices vary around the country, some take home messages seem clear.

Ray: The range is dramatic, and I think that we’ve learned a lot, and as the data percolate through, and we really have a chance to have a little distance on all this and look back, I think we’ll recognize that there were some things that really did keep us safer. Evidence from our experience at Johns Hopkins Hospital is that masks work amazingly well. The worn mask that’s fitted well, that’s worn, so you find one that’s comfortable really does provide a dramatic degree of protection and we saw very little transmission in healthcare workers who were wearing a mask.  :30

Ray says it’s premature to declare Covid infection on the decline, noting that with the arrival of fall emergence of new variants is likely. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.