The Big COVID Question for Hospitals This Fall

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Back in the spring, around the end of the COVID-19 public-health emergency, hospitals around the country underwent a change in dress code. The masks that staff had been wearing at work for more than three years vanished, in some places overnight. At UChicago Medicine, where masking policies softened at the end of May, Emily Landon, the executive medical director of infection prevention and control, fielded hate mail from colleagues, some chiding her for waiting too long to lift the requirement, others accusing her of imperiling the immunocompromised. At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which did away with masking in April, ahead of many institutions, Tom Talbot, the chief hospital epidemiologist, was inundated with thank-yous. “People were ready; they were tired,” he told me. “They’d been asking for several months before that, ‘Can we not stop?’”

But across hospitals and policies, infection-prevention experts shared one sentiment: They felt almost certain that the masks would need to return, likely by the end of the calendar year. The big question was exactly when.

For some hospitals, the answer is . In recent weeks, as COVID-19 hospitalizations have been rising nationwide, stricter masking requirements, , and . But what’s happening around the country is hardly uniform. The coming respiratory-virus season will be the country’s first —its first, since the arrival of COVID, without crisis-caliber funding set aside, routine tracking of community spread, and health-care precautions already in place. After years of fighting COVID in concert, hospitals are back to going it alone.