New C.D.C. Guidelines Suggest 70 Percent of Americans Can Stop Wearing Masks

The agency issued a new set of recommendations intended to help communities live with the virus and get back to normal life.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday offered a new strategy to help communities across the country live with the coronavirus and get back to some version of normal life.

The new guidelines suggest that 70 percent of Americans can now stop wearing masks, and no longer need to social distance or avoid crowded indoor spaces.

The recommendations no longer rely only on the number of cases in a community to determine the need for restrictions such as mask wearing. Instead, they direct counties to consider three measures to assess risk of the virus: new Covid-related hospital admissions over the previous week and the percentage of hospital beds occupied by Covid patients, as well as new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people over the previous week.