Covid and obligation to masks. There is an extension until 30 June 2024 of the measures contained in the ordinance signed on 28 April by the Minister of Health, Orazio Schillaciwhich provides for the obligation to wear a mask for workers, users and visitors of health facilities within the departments hosting frail, elderly or immunosuppressed patients, especially if they require high intensity of care, identified by the Health Management of the health facilities themselves .
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Covid, here’s where the mask is mandatory until June 30th
The extension is expected to be made official with the publication of the ordinance in the Gazette. In particular, based on the extended ordinance, the obligation is extended to workers, users and visitors of social-health and social-welfare facilities, including hospitality and long-term care facilities, healthcare residences, hospices, rehabilitation facilities, residential facilities for the elderly, including those who are not self-sufficient. In other departments of health facilities and in waiting rooms, the decision on the use of respiratory protection devices by health workers and visitors remains at the discretion of the Health Directorates, who can also order their use for all those who present respiratory symptoms.
No similar measures are envisaged for hospital spaces located outside the inpatient departments. Children under the age of six are not obliged to wear a mask; people with pathologies or disabilities incompatible with the use of the mask, as well as people who must communicate with a person with a disability so as not to be able to use the device.
Rezza: «Without a mask, viruses start to run again»
«The point is that everyone has forgotten about the flu. It hasn’t been there for two years but the disease still has the same characteristics. And we must not think that it is trivial, it can cause bronchopneumonia as a consequence of bacterial super-infections, which start in people debilitated by the virus”, said the epidemiologist Gianni Rezza, former director of Prevention at the ministry, in a recent interview with La Repubblica. of health. For Rezza, «it was the end of the measures against the pandemic that made the viruses spread more. So it has nothing to do with vaccines or disease but precisely the fact that for two years viruses, apart from Covid, have not circulated. Among other things, measures such as masks are more effective against the flu than against Covid.” As for the peak of the flu, he says: “We should be close, I expect it in January.”
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