TAMPA, Fla. — People at MacDill Air Force Base will be required to mask up regardless of vaccination status, officials confirmed to 10 Tampa Bay.
The policy will go into effect Thursday, July 29.
In addition, gatherings of 25 people or more will not be allowed under any circumstance. A full update will be posted to the base's Facebook page.
The CDC reversed course Tuesday on some of its masking guidelines, recommending that vaccinated people return to wearing masks indoors in parts of the U.S. where there are surging cases of COVID-19.
People who are unvaccinated always have been asked to wear a mask.
In Florida, nearly every corner of the state is dealing with high transmission rates of the virus.
Most new infections in the U.S. continue to be among unvaccinated people. So-called breakthrough infections, which generally cause milder illness, can occur in vaccinated people. When earlier strains of the virus predominated, infected vaccinated people were found to have low levels of virus and were deemed unlikely to spread the virus much, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said.
But with the delta variant, the level of virus in infected vaccinated people is "indistinguishable” from the level of virus in the noses and throats of unvaccinated people, Walensky said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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