GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Many school districts have already decided whether masks will be required this upcoming year, but doctors are again standing by their recommendations in hopes of educating the public.
“Nobody likes the word mandate, but I we wanna provide education so that people feel compelled with currently available evidence to have their kids wear masks in school,” said Bellin Health Dr. Brad Burmeister. “Our primary goal is to try to keep kids in school as much as we possibly can without having symptoms or infection with COVID, and the evidence supports wearing masks to keep that as our goal.”
But that encouragement to take precautions extends beyond the classroom. Burmeister says it takes a community to protect one.
“We’re focused on the health of everyone in our entire population and community,” Burmeister said.
Burmeister says among the 600 people currently hospitalized across the state for COVID-19, about 50 of those are in Northeast Wisconsin. He says that’s nearly half of how many were hospitalized during last year’s peak.
“It’s pretty striking growth. We are doing everything we can to prevent this trend from continuing, because if we continue to grow the number of cases I think it’s going to be very concerning to our community,” Burmeister said. “We know that having a recent interaction with COVID-19 offers some protection against future infections, but we also know that there are breakthrough infections with people who’ve had COVID in the past, where they can acquire it again…Current evidence suggests that if you’ve been infected before, if you give it 90 days or so, it’s very reasonable to pursue vaccination at that time to sort of maximize your immunity and prevent infection again.”
He expects roughly 3-percent of people to be eligible for a third ‘booster’ dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.
And amidst a number of protests by local healthcare workers on vaccine mandates, Dr. Burmeister says at Bellin they try to make their employees understand how important the vaccine is. At this time, Bellin does not have a vaccine mandate for employees.
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