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Masks should remain
at health care sites
Re: “Patients’ health risked by lifting mask mandates” (Page A6, May).
Kudos to Dr. Aboelata for her commentary. I can attest to the devastating impact the decision to remove masks from health care has had on high-risk patients.
It’s not just hospitalized patients now at risk. Every time immunocompromised patients need a medical visit, a lab test, an X-ray or any other in-person service, we must weigh whether it’s worth it to contract COVID. As a Kaiser patient, I know they have not offered any accommodations for high-risk patients to safely continue accessing care. One-way masking is far less effective in light of current highly contagious variants. We are exposed to COVID not just by unmasked providers, but also by maskless patients with whom we share crowded waiting rooms and check-in lines. We are reluctantly foregoing vital diagnostic and preventive care as being too dangerous now.
Why are health care institutions putting their most vulnerable patients in this awful position?
Dorothy Graham
Oakland
Republicans will keep
gun violence going
The daily gun killings in this country, which can now be described as the Wild West of 200 years ago, will never end.
As long as the NRA exists, as long as Republicans in Congress keep accepting money from the NRA and as long as certain Republican governors say it’s OK to carry a gun anywhere one wants to without a permit, people will continue to die and will blame it on “mental illness” or whatever else can be found on which to blame it. Other nations have mental illness issues without the daily gun madness we have here.
The NRA, gun-supporting Republicans in Congress and gun-supporting governors are absolutely complicit in these murders. When will people wake up and realize who is actually responsible for the loss of those they love?
Ramona Krausnick
Dublin