Philadelphia reinstates mask mandate as virus cases rise
PHILADELPHIA — The city of Philadelphia has become the first major U.S. city to reinstate an indoor mask mandate this spring, responding to sharply rising numbers of new coronavirus cases. The reinstatement, announced last week, took effect Monday.
The mandate requires masks in all indoor public places, although businesses have the option of choosing instead to require proof of vaccination from their employees and customers. It was reimposed a little more than a month after the city lifted it in early March.
The response has been mixed. Some public health advocates applauded the move. A group of business owners and residents Saturday sued to stop it. The leading Democratic candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, called such mandates “counterproductive.” Many Philadelphians were not entirely sure what to make of it all.
The lawsuit accuses city health officials of having “usurped the power and authority” of state lawmakers, the state department of health and the state advisory health board.
Kevin Lessard, communications director of the Philadelphia mayor’s office, said officials were “unable to comment on this particular case” but cited a court’s denial of an emergency motion by another plaintiff for a preliminary injunction against the mandate. Lessard said “the courts once again confirmed that city has both the legal authority and requisite flexibility to enact the precautionary measures necessary to control the spread of COVID-19.”
“There’s really no sense of stability with regards to business,” said Shane Dodd, who co-owns a bistro in the Fairmount neighborhood
of the city.
Like other restaurant owners, he said it would be a hassle to again have to confront the occasional stubbornly anti-mask customer. He feared losing business to restaurants in the suburbs and worried that a nervous public would interpret the mandate as a sign that it was not safe to go out to eat.
“It’s a never-ending story,” Dodd said.
Philadelphia’s decision to reinstate the mandate comes at a strange time in the pandemic. The omicron subvariant known as BA.2 has reversed the decline in new cases in the Northeast. But it is spreading in a country that is better vaccinated now than it was when the delta variant arrived around this time last year, and one that has more antiviral medication options available than before.
Still, many people have long since lost their appetite for vigilance, and even some of the most cautious have grown weary. Philadelphia, a city that has been broadly compliant with public health directives for the past two years, is a case study in how thin patience has worn for pandemic restrictions, even in a place where thousands of people have died from COVID-19.
“From the kind of larger public health perspective, this is a constant dance that we are in, especially here in the United States, of when to put things into policy,” said Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and associate dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
Philadelphia’s reinstated mask requirement is based on its own COVID mitigation guidelines, which differ from those of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The mandate kicked in automatically because the average number of new cases reported in the city had risen above 100 a day and, more significantly, had increased more than 50% in 10 days.
The latest CDC guidelines place more emphasis on hospital admissions and occupied hospital beds, measures of the strain on health care systems rather than direct gauges of infection risk; those metrics tend to lag weeks behind the trend in new cases.
By the CDC’s guidelines, Philadelphia was still solidly in the “low” category when the mask mandate was reinstated.