Philadelphia cancels days-old mask mandate
People in Philadelphia could be excused if they felt a sense of whiplash Friday as the city abandoned its indoor mask mandate just days after becoming the first U.S. metropolis to reimpose compulsory mask-wearing in response to an increase in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.
City officials who had previously stressed the need to head off a new wave of coronavirus infections by requiring people to mask up indoors abruptly called it off after what they said was an unexpected drop in the number of people in the hospital and a leveling-off of new infections.
The city had taken plenty of heat for the renewed masking order, with a lawsuit already filed and two of the three leading Democratic candidates for Pennsylvania’s open U.S. Senate seat expressing opposition to it at a debate Thursday night. But city officials insisted Friday their decision was about the data, not any external legal or political pressure.
“I had said when I announced this that if we didn’t see hospitalizations rising, that we needed to rethink this and that we shouldn’t have a mandate. So that’s what we’re doing today,” the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Cheryl Bettigole, said at a virtual news conference Friday.
The quick about-face in Philadelphia came as travelers across the country removed masks in response to a federal judge’s ruling that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention overstepped its authority in issuing a mask mandate on planes and trains and in travel hubs. The Biden administration is appealing.
In the absence of a federal mandate, municipal transit agencies were left to decide for themselves – with a patchwork of rules the result.
Philadelphia’s transit authority dropped its mask mandate after the legal ruling, while Los Angeles County bucked national trends and said Thursday it will still require masks on public
transit including trains, subways, buses, taxis and rideshares.
City officials said their decision to rescind the mandate was based on the numbers, even though daily fluctuations are common.
Hospitalizations peaked at 82 on Sunday and have since drifted down, to 65 on Thursday, according to the Department of Public Health. New confirmed infections reached a peak of 377 on April 14 but have since leveled off. City health officials said that was enough to convince them that mandatory masking was no longer needed.
“It is a very short span of time, because that’s the span of time we needed to see what was going to happen next,” Bettigole said.
Virus numbers do change fast enough that mask guidance could be altered in a matter of days, said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.
“We’ve been doing this for two years, and over three days you can get some pretty nice trends,” he said.
Along with axing the mask mandate, Philadelphia is canceling its tiered COVID-19 response system, in place since February, that automatically triggered indoor masking and other restrictions in response to rising caseloads, hospitalizations and positivity rates.