News Room

RALEIGH – If people stop wearing masks and vaccination efforts decline, the number of new infections from COVID-19 in Wake County alone will soar to more than 2,000 a day a year from now. However, new infections will drop to less than 200 if preventive are maintained. So warn researchers at three of the state’s major universities in a new study.

New data and models offer additional insights into how COVID-19 will affect North Carolina in the coming months. The work includes an interactive platform that offers statewide or county-level projections of how changes in risk reduction efforts – such as mask use – and the increase in more infectious variants of COVID-19 could affect the spread of COVID in North Carolina.

On Friday, hundreds of protesters gathered on the Rutgers University campus to oppose the college's rule that students present evidence of having fully vaccinated against COVID-19 prior to attending on-site classes.

The most recent federal guidance on wearing masks offered a glimmer of hope that the pandemic’s end was inching closer, but it has also caused confusion, anger and worry. On May 13, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that fully vaccinated individuals no longer had to wear masks indoors, except in hospitals, on public transit and in other specified places. In that directive, there was incentive for people who hadn’t yet been vaccinated against COVID-19 to go get their shots, but the guidance also left even experts wondering what it meant for individuals and society as a whole.

This week four experts testified at a US Senate committee about the impacts of personal protective equipment (PPE) and drug shortages during COVID-19, the effectiveness of the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), and what kind of steps leaders must take to be better prepared for the next public health emergency.