Starting Wednesday, December 20, UPMC will be re-instating their masking policy for employees, patients and visitors.

This comes after the hospital has seen an uptick in respiratory viruses including Covid-19, the flu and RSV and want to do their part to take a proactive approach to preventing the spread of illnesses.

A surgical mask will be required to be worn by anyone who enters a UPMC facility, if a person doesn't have a mask, one will be provided.

Hospital officials at UPMC explained why they decided to make this decision to bring masking back and how long it could be around for.

Emily Shears, the Vice President of Operations at UPMC Hamot said, "We're monitoring basically the cases in our community and the cases within our health care facilities and we will adjust the protocols as the situations evolves. We are using internal data to say we are seeing a significant amount of increase to institute the strategic masking at the moment and when we see those numbers go down, we will stop the masking."

Shears continued to explain the parameters the hospital as when making a decision like this. " They have set some internal thresholds that they are monitoring for all of our hospitals and we have met that first threshold to go into the strategic masking time period and so we will maintain that masking until we are able to get under that threshold again", said Shears.

As far as other local hospitals go:

In a statement AHN explained their masking policy "According to CDC data and our own internal tracking, the numbers of Emergency Department visits and hospitalizations related to Covid-19 and flu remain low across AHN’s footprint and manageable at AHN Saint Vincent. While we will continue to take appropriate precautions at our hospitals and outpatient facilities when caring for patients with respiratory illness, including mask wearing among patients and staff, AHN is not implementing a broad masking requirement at this time. We will continue to monitor the situation to determine if and when a network-wide masking mandate is required."

Meantime, LECOM Health said, "LECOM Health constantly monitors the community case count of all respiratory viruses – influenza, covid, and RSV. We are currently requiring all staff and visitors of our long-term care facilities to wear surgical masks, and will continue to monitor whether we see the need to reinstate a mask policy in our other healthcare facilities.”