Junta de Andalucia to study whether to maintain the use of face masks in areas with vulnerable patients

The Junta de Andalucía's Ministry of Health and Consumer Affairs will consider maintaining the obligatory use of masks in some situations in the region, after Spain's Official State Gazette (BOE) published the end of the requirement, in the last remaining areas: health care facilities, social care centres and pharmacies.

This was indicated by the Director General of Public Health and Pharmaceutical Organisation, Jorge del Diego, in an interview with Onda Local de Andalucía, in which he pointed out that this decision "makes sense in certain areas, such as pharmacies, but with the general elimination in all other areas, such as hospitals, primary care centres and also residential centres, we will have to study whether Andalucía is going to reinforce the use of masks in certain places".

On whether this would be a recommendation or an obligation, Del Diego pointed out that each region "can be completely competent to make it compulsory in certain places if they consider it to be so".

Del Diego added: "Now it has been published in the BOE, and we can know the text and its scope with certainty, we first have to study what this publication means for certain regulations that the Junta de Andalucía itself has, and from there, looking at the epidemiological situation, the level of vaccination, protection, and what the situation is like in hospitals, primary care centres and health centres, we will be able to determine whether the use of masks is obligatory in certain places".

When asked about the places where masks could continue to be obligatory in Andalucía, the director general said that "we will have to study whether they make sense in, for example, emergency deparments and hospital areas where the most vulnerable patients and those at greatest risk are located, such as the intensive care units or oncohaematology areas, where people have much lower defences".

He added that "we will also have to assess them in residential centres for the elderly and disabled people, and what happens to those workers or visitors who may or may not have respiratory symptoms. The fact that they are no longer compulsory does not mean that they are no longer effective, and they have been a very good measure for controlling certain respiratory infections".