“Let’s make it really simple,” Wen said. “There should only be two things we look at at this point. No. 1: Are hospitals and ICUs overwhelmed? No. 2: Are the vaccines still protective against severe illness? As long as hospitals are not overwhelmed and vaccines protect against severe illness, we should not have required masking or other restrictions.”

Faust pointed to California’s “Spare the Air” days where the public is alerted that air quality is poor on certain days. “Officials say: ‘OK, the pollution is really bad? Today public transportation is free. Or people are going to telecommute.’ They make changes to get the pollution down,” Faust said.”The same thing is true here. We have an outbreak here. Let’s do something about it and then we can go back to normal,” he said.

Officials need to find a way to consider the combination of local vaccination rates, particularly in schools, as well as local case rates and hospital ICU capacity, Megan Ranney, academic dean at the Brown University School of Public Health told Axios. She said the scientific community seems to be coalescing around a goal of an 80% to 85% vaccination rate, case numbers of somewhere between 50 to 100 per 100,000 people for seven days, and ICUs around 20% capacity, she said.