State won't require masks in hospitals

New York state will end its requirement that masks be worn in health care settings, including hospitals and nursing homes, starting Sunday, health officials announced Friday.

After that, such facilities will be allowed to set their own masking rules. The move brings the state's guidance in line with that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which lifted the federal mandate requiring masks in health care facilities in September.

“The pandemic is not over, yet we are moving to a transition,” the state's acting health commissioner, Dr. James McDonald, said in a statement. He noted that March 1 would mark three years since the first case of COVID-19 was identified in New York.

New York City's public hospital system will continue to require that masks be worn in its facilities, an official said in a statement.

Brian Conway, a spokesperson for the Greater New York Hospital Association, an industry trade group, said that hospitals in the state had been prepared for the mandate to expire.

The group, he said, would continue to make decisions based on CDC guidelines and would “remain hypervigilant for spikes in transmissible infections.”

A number of groups representing people with disabilities have written to Gov. Kathy Hochul urging her to reverse the decision.

“If there's anything we learned in the last three years, it's that nursing homes and other health facilities are the absolute last place you want to be in a pandemic,” the groups wrote in their letter, adding that the decision to end the mandate would “put disabled people, older people and everyone else at greater risk from this often-deadly disease.”

The end of the state mask mandate in health care settings comes days after Mayor Eric Adams ended New York City's vaccine mandate for municipal workers, citing the 96% vaccination rate within that group.