Some hospitals are bringing back masking - and the general public should consider it this fall too, experts say

Some hospitals are instigating stricter masking rules again amid an uptick in COVID-19 cases, and although we’ve probably seen the end of broad masking mandates, some experts say the general public should also be making more use of this tool in our arsenal of measures to fight illness.

As sniffling season falls upon us amid an uptick in COVID-19 cases across the country, should we be bringing masking back in health-care settings and reaching for them more often in our daily lives?

Some hospitals are bringing back stricter masking rules again, and although we’ve probably seen the end of broad masking mandates from governments, some experts say the general public should also be making more use of this tool in our arsenal of measures to fight illness.

Last spring, universal mask mandates in health-care settings were lifted in regions across Canada, with some provinces leaving it up to individual hospitals to decide the specifics. Broadly, this meant that patients and visitors were likely not required to wear masks outside of high-risk areas of hospitals, and staff were not required to wear them except in situations where they would have worn a mask before the pandemic, such as operating rooms.

The number of Canadians hospitalized with COVID-19 has been increasing since mid-August, with 2,848 Canadians currently in hospital as of Tuesday.

“Without doubt, we should be masking in hospitals,” Dr. Tara Moriarty, infectious diseases researcher and associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Dentistry, told CTVNews.ca. in a phone interview earlier this month.

“It should be good quality masks, where people walk in the door and they put the masks on, and those masks stay on for the entire time that they're in the hospital so that you can protect other people who might be sitting in the same waiting room or a patient. If you're visiting someone who's in hospital and and you're not too worried about the person you're visiting, … their roommate might be someone who is particularly vulnerable to being infected with COVID. So we all need to start doing that and not just putting them on when we go into patient rooms.”

Moriarty runs a team tracking COVID-19 levels across the country. Their latest COVID-19 forecast, posted Monday, estimated that one in 29 people in Canada are currently infected with COVID-19.