‘not there yet’ on mandate return
Boston is “not there yet” in following Philadelphia’s lead and reimplementing a mask mandate, Mayor Michelle Wu told reporters as case counts trend upward — and now, with no emergency declaration in place, it technically would be up to the Board of Health, anyway.
“We’re not there yet,” Wu repeated a couple of times in a press conference Tuesday, though she did note the increasing numbers.
Asked how close we are to “there yet,” she responded, “It’s all relative,” and said that though case counts and percent positivity are climbing, hospitalizations haven’t followed suit.
She noted that the current community positivity rate — that of tests in Boston no including ones issued by the colleges — has now ticked back up to 5.9%. That’s over the 5% threshold, Wu noted.
That’s one of the three marks that the city cited in removing mask and vaccine rules a couple of months ago. The other two marks, both around hospitalization numbers, remain well below their thresholds. One, the average number of people in Boston hospitals with COVID-19, stands around 68, and has only trended slightly up from a low a month ago of about 12 fewer. The threshold for that mark is 200.
And the other is the percent of ICU beds occupied, which is sitting around 88% and is remaining about flat.
The threshold is 95%.
On Monday, Philadelphia reinstituted a mask mandate. Boston was among the last to lift its mask rule when it did so in February as the January omicron-variant-driven surge died down.
Wu’s administration — like the previous two under former Mayor Marty Walsh and Acting Mayor Kim Janey — moved quickly and unilaterally in the past to implement or reimplement restrictions as cases increased. But that was under the previous twoyear-long emergency declaration, put in place in March 2020 and left there by the low-activity Boston Public Health Commission Board of Health, which met little more than a dozen times throughout the whole pandemic.
The board effectively ceded authority to the executive director of the BPHC, who currently is Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, a Wu cabinet member. That meant City Hall effectively called the shots around major actions such as mask mandates and vaccine passports, putting them in place without public meetings and sometimes with little notice to other officials.
But after protests mounted — both in front of Wu’s home in Roslindale over the mandates and in statements from city councilors over the apparently open-ended emergency declaration — the city and the board combined to end the state of emergency, taking those powers back from Ojikutu and placing them on the board, which now would need to vote to approve any major new change like making everyone mask back up inside businesses.
“These kinds of policy decisions would be informed by the public health data and would be made in consultation with Mayor Wu and the Board of Health,” a BPHC spokesman said. “Any potential public health orders related to face coverings would be presented to the Board of Health for consideration.”