UPenn chief medical officer: Pa. schools should keep enforcing masks, regardless of court decision | Expert Opinion

Last Friday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided to lift the Secretary of Health’s school masking mandate, a move that is being hailed as a victory for parents and liberty. As a medical professional, I disagree.

Like other supporters of the mandate, I see the court’s decision as tragically misguided, especially in a state where COVID-19 cases have climbed by nearly 50% during the past two weeks alone, after a sharp uptick that began in early November.

To be clear, school leaders still have the authority to require masks in their buildings. They should continue to do so — even though the court has made their job immeasurably more difficult.

It is easy to imagine that, under pressure from some parents and school boards, some schools will lift mandates immediately. Others will take a more temperate approach and follow the current data and trends in the pandemic and make their decisions after the holiday wave has abated. Whatever the underlying legal principles on the administration’s authority, lifting school masking mandates will further propagate the idea that the pandemic is past and leave us more vulnerable.

The Court’s decision and the premature removal of masks in many public settings such as arenas, restaurants, churches, and retail establishments is part of a larger trend that ignores the reality of where we are in the pandemic.

The transmission of COVID-19 has worsened in the community, and the situation in hospitals has reached dire extremes: Across the Commonwealth, 5,000 people now lay hospitalized with the disease, over ten times the number hospitalized most days last July. Many in health care have declared that they have never seen anything like it.

The “Great Resignation” — also known as the nation’s major labor shortage — has affected health care as much as any other industry, perhaps more so. The frontlines are stretched thin at every hospital and there is no bench. Staff are subject to the physical and verbal abuse by families and patients that we have witnessed among airline passengers. Nursing and respiratory therapy are professions particularly hard hit, because are they physically demanding roles which require specialized expertise and have often incurred high risks of on-the-job infection during the pandemic.

The COVID boom is only part of the problem. The pent-up demand for services delayed in 2020 led to many filled hospital beds this year, well before this latest wave of the pandemic began. The good news is that in the Philadelphia region, while community transmission has been rising dramatically in recent weeks, COVID hospitalizations are well below the peaks seen in past waves. However, hospitals cannot afford to set aside even a dozen beds for COVID patients given the current high demand for services and the stress on staff.

Hospitals will now have to make decisions to balance the urgency of COVID care with the need to continue to provide their normal services for patients with cancer, heart disease, stroke, trauma, and other illnesses. Hospitals in other regions of the Commonwealth have already begun to adjust nurse staffing ratios and curtail or delay some services as COVID cases begin to spike again.

These circumstances were preventable. Most hospital admissions – 75% to 80% – now occur among people who have not been vaccinated.

This is why the end of masking in the midst of a pandemic surge is not something to celebrate. There will be still more illness, hospitalization, and death, particularly among those who are most vulnerable because they hesitate to take the vaccine or their immune system is impaired.

When the advocates who have successfully fought the Commonwealth’s mandate to mask in schools finish their victory lap, they should join the effort to tell their constituents the truth about vaccines and masking and work to see that they are protected. Real liberty from the death and economic destruction of COVID will come not with a victory in court, but when we defeat the pandemic with science and public health.

PJ Brennan is an infectious disease physician and chief medical officer of the University of Pennsylvania Health System.