PEORIA, Ill. — Staff, patients and visitors will be required to wear face masks again starting Tuesday (February 28) at OSF HealthCare’s St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria due to elevated COVID-19 transmission levels, an OSF spokesperson says.
OSF lifted mask requirements just three weeks ago because of decreased community spread, but the latest weekly check shows transmission levels rising again in the Tri-County area of Peoria, Tazewell and Woodford Counties.
Dr. Doug Kasper, with the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Peoria, tells WMBD’s “Greg and Dan”, the data comes directly from the CDC.
“There’ll be a kind of bumping around, when the data goes up…the numbers go up and the numbers go down. And, for institutions that have high-risk areas, in-patient hospital settings, or nursing homes or things like that, you’ll see where this policy kind of changes back and forth,” Kasper says.
But, none of this reflects any wide changes, as far as COVID parameters or new information, Kasper adds.
OSF Healthcare says the earliest they’d revisit masking requirements again would be next Tuesday (February 7) for the St. Francis Medical Center campus.
