[CliffFletcher]

Most people - including health care professionals - don’t like wearing a mask all day. The removal of mask mandates is being done, in part, to allow health care professionals to wear them only where it’s deemed essential.

Part of the reasoning behind the shift in policy is to remove the need for health-care workers, who have faced severe burnout throughout the pandemic, to constantly mask in every area of the hospital — while also still allowing them the freedom to continue to do so.

"We know that most of our staff, when they got infected, weren't getting infected at work, they were getting infected in the community," said Dr. Michael Gardam, an infectious disease specialist and CEO of Health P.E.I.

"And so really the time has kind of come and gone for this and we need to get to a new state where we are masking when we need to — but not routinely, everyday, everywhere."

Dr. Alon Vaisman, an infection control physician at Toronto's University Health Network (UHN) and assistant medical professor at the University of Toronto, said removing universal mask mandates in all health-care settings would likely help to ease health-care worker burnout.

"I absolutely see the reasoning there, because it seems like a very low-risk manoeuvre. I think it's important to recognize that if you take health-care workers, for example, they've been working extremely hard the last three years," he said.

"And if there's anything we can do to try to alleviate the stress, if you could remove masking where it's no longer necessary and where the risk is extremely low, I think if you could do that it's very helpful to reduce burnout."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/mask-...care-1.6811240