Spain Imposes Nationwide COVID Mask Mandate at Health Facilities

People wearing protective face masks walk on the street in a file photo. Chung I Ho/The Epoch Times

Spain’s Ministry of Health said on Wednesday that it will implement an order to mandate masks at health care facilities across the country.

“What we have to do is protect the most vulnerable people,” Spanish Health Minister Monica Garcia told reporters, claiming the rule is “just common sense.”

The new leftist minority coalition government is imposing the measure despite opposition from most of Spain’s 17 autonomous regions.

“I don’t think it is any drama. It is a basic and simple measure of the first order,” Ms. Garcia added.

The health ministry ordered the wearing of masks in hospitals and health care centers and recommended masks in private clinics, pharmacies, and other medical facilities such as dentist offices. Several Spanish regions had already ordered patients, visitors, and staff at hospitals to wear masks last week.

Spain’s central government on Monday had proposed extending that requirement nationwide before Ms. Garcia’s statement Wednesday. The regions will be able to lift the requirement if infections fall for two weeks.

Spain was among the last European countries to drop requirements to wear face masks following the COVID-10 pandemic, with people told to wear them on public transport until February 2023, and in health centers and pharmacies until July.

“We’ve talked and we’ve reflected deeply on the role of masks—especially in health centers and hospitals—when it comes to protecting both patients and health professionals,” Ms. Garcia said earlier this week.

Last week, the Spanish Society of Emergency Medicine said that Spanish residents seeking emergency care for influenza, COVID-19, and other respiratory illnesses are up 35 percent compared with the same time last year.

However, the move was not without pushback from other officials. For example Isabel Diaz Ayuso, the president of Spain’s Madrid region, said Ms. Garcia’s announcement mandating masks is not necessary.

“Making masks obligatory now shows improvisation,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday. “Madrid has fewer cases because it has been working against flu for a long time: strategies; recommendations; daily monitoring, vaccinations … imposition through imposition is the resort of a weak manager.”

Several Spanish regions, meanwhile, voted against reintroducing the mask mandate this week, reported EuroNews. The new mandate will not apply to pharmacies, the country’s health ministry also said.

Spain declared a formal end to the health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic last July, saying people no longer needed to wear masks in health and care centers and pharmacies. Over the previous two years, Spain had gradually ended mandatory mask wearing, first in public and then on public transport.

While government entities such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and others have cited data and studies that claim masks are effective in blocking COVID-19 transmission, a number of studies have cast doubt on those claims since the early days of the pandemic. In 2022, the CDC also conceded at one point that certain masks do not offer much protection against COVID-19.

Inside the US

In the United States, a number of hospital systems and county health departments have re-implemented mask mandates, with officials citing a recent rise in COVID-19 and influenza.

Several days ago, officials in Los Angeles County re-issued a mask mandate for hospitals and other health care settings, saying that the COVID-19 hospitalization rate met a certain threshold to reinstate the rule.

In New York City, the health department last month instituted a mask rule at 11 public hospitals across the city’s five boroughs. Earlier in January, several top hospital systems in Philadelphia did the same.

“What we don’t want is staffing shortages, right?” New York City’s health commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, told local media outlet WABC TV on Jan. 3. “When we saw the omicron wave in 2022, the biggest issues were not only people getting sick, but that we had a lot of front-line health workers, they were out with COVID.”

Hospitals in Illinois, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Delaware, and Washington state have imposed mask requirements, local media reported.

Data from the CDC shows that COVID-19 cases are on the rise, but the agency’s historical data suggest that the number of cases is smaller than the caseload a year ago. For the week ending Dec. 30, 2023, hospitalizations reached about 34,800; but on Dec. 31, 2022, that number was more than 44,500, according to agency data.

New Variant Numbers

It comes as the latest COVID-19 variant, JN.1, now accounts for more than half of all cases in the United States, said the CDC late last week.

The variant “estimated to account for approximately 62 percent of all currently circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants, an increase from the estimated prevalence of 44 percent two weeks ago,” the agency said on Jan. 5, noting that JN.1 is increasingly becoming more common among international travelers.

But public health officials and the CDC have stated that there is no evidence that JN.1 presents different symptoms than other variants. There’s also not any evidence to suggest it may cause more severe symptoms or more hospitalizations.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.