Lamont: No mask, pay $100

Governor to institute fines up to $500 for large events

Exercising your freedom not to wear a mask may cost you $100. Throwing an event that exceeds 25 people indoors or 100 outdoors? That could set you back $500. Attending that over-populated event? Fork over $250.

Local police, health departments and elected officials will be able to issue the fines under a forthcoming executive order from Gov. Ned Lamont aimed at cutting a COVID-19 infection rate that inched over one percent for the last week.

Lamont announced the new fines, which will take effect this week, on Monday, a day when he declared the opening of public schools a success — with 32 infections through the weekend among students, teachers and staff across the state. That is far lower than the rate of COVID-19 in the state as a whole.

Lamont said the fines were in response to mayors and first selectmen who want teeth in the state coronavirus rules that have been, in effect, mostly suggestions on public use of masks and attendance at private events. “This is really following the lead of our municipalities saying that we need a little more leverage when people are breaking the rules; when institutions and businesses are breaking the rules,” Lamont said.

“If you have to count, get out,” he said in rhyme to coincide with the months-old slogan “If you have to ask, wear a mask.” The fines are similar to those adopted in neighboring states. Currently, the only legal tool local officials have is to arrest people on misdemeanors if they disobey guidance such as wearing masks in stores.

Arrests, local officials complained, might be too serious, as opposed to the $100 fine, equivalent to an infraction.

“This was the request in working collaboratively with our municipalities, our local health directors, our law enforcement,” said Paul Mounds, Lamont’s chief of staff. “It wasn’t an edict from on-high.”

The governor likens the next two to three months of the Connecticut coronavirus landscape to the fourth quarter of a high school football game, although he conceded not knowing the trajectory of the disease.

And speaking of football, Lamont pushed hard for the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference to postpone the autumn season to the late winter and spring, ending any wavering he showed last week, when the conference made its case for traditional fall ball.

“I think it could make a world of difference where it’s much safer,” Lamont said of a late-winter season that could coincide with new five-minute COVID tests and advanced medical therapies.

Separately, the agency that operates Metro North has begun enforcing a $50 fine for passengers not wearing masks. By late afternoon, there were no reports of fines on the trains.

Lamont also announced new protocols for those entering the state from most of the country with unacceptably high infection rates of 10-percent or more. Travelers can avoid a 14-day quarantine if they show a proof of a negative COVID test within three days of arriving here, or if they get a negative test upon entering Connecticut, where they will wait in quarantine until the test results are available.

“This is a pretty good time to make it a little bit easier for people, assuming if they cannot quarantine, they can at least test, and I think we can keep our people safe and allow a little more commerce back and forth,” Lamont said. Josh Geballe, the state’s chief operating officer, said that current rules are a little harder to understand and the new guidance, similar to Massachusetts, will likely get better response.

Monday marked six days since the state’s testing rate moved above 1 percent, with 569 positive tests over a weekend in which 54,895 tests were reported, for a 1.04 percent positive rate. The upward trend started Sept. 9.

“I think we’re still in a pretty good place,” Lamont said during his daily news conference in the state Capitol. He reported five additional fatalities over the weekend, bringing the death toll to 4,485 in the pandemic. While the net 64 hospitalization was up 13 from Friday, it’s still within an expected range of between 50 and 70. In April, at the height of the pandemic, there were 1,972 hospitalizations.

The infection rate at state colleges and universities remains below 1 percent, very low compared to many universities in the West and South. The University of

Connecticut reported 17 new cases over the weekend, with nine on-campus, eight off campus. Last week the school said it would quarantine students living off campus at The Oaks on the Square apartments after a spike in cases there. Nonstudent residents there are not being told to quarantine.

That came after Sacred Heart University quarantined around 1,700 off-campus students living in Bridgeport over the Labor Day weekend amid a rise in off-campus cases there.

Lamont said the state’s public schools are also national leaders.

“We’ve had 32 infections,” he said. “That’s 32 out of six or 700,000 students and teachers and administrators. It’s a much-lower positivity rate that we’re used to seeing in the general population right now. Maybe there have been 10 or 12 buildings out of all of the buildings across our school system.”

The schools would have had 200 to 250 infections so far, after two weeks, if reports of positive testes were at the same rate as the state as a whole; and upwards of 1,000 at the rate of the nation.

About a third of students are attending kindergarten through eighth grade, but Lamont expects that to rise to 50 percent over the next few weeks. “C’mon New Haven, I think you ought to take a look,” Lamont said of the city that opted for distance learning only. “You have a very low infection rate and these kids ought to have an option to go to school.”

The goal is to get 80 percent of students back into the classrooms.

Lamont