The governor of Delaware on Monday announced his state would lift school mask mandates in the coming weeks, aiming for a return to normalcy as the surge in coronavirus infections fueled by the Omicron variant abates in their states.
Delaware's Gov. John Carney, a Democrat, joined fellow Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy of neighboring New Jersey in taking their states off emergency footing and shifting toward policies that treat the virus as part of normal life.
By no longer requiring students, teachers and administrators to wear masks in schools, the governors are also seeking to blunt one of the most divisive issues of the pandemic. Republican leaders in some states, including Florida and Texas, have banned mask mandates in schools, while Democrats have generally encouraged the policy to help stall new infection.
In New Jersey, where the number of new cases have decreased over the past two weeks, Gov. Murphy announced the state would lift its school mask mandate on March 7.
Carney said Delaware would rescind its mask mandate for indoor public settings on Friday and lift its school mask mandate on March 31.
"We're in a much better place than we were several weeks ago," Carney wrote on Twitter, but he added: "The virus still poses a risk of serious illness, particularly among those who are not up to date on their vaccinations."
President Joe Biden met U.S. governors last week at the White House, where the state leaders expressed a desire to return to a sense of normalcy nearly two years after the pandemic forced many schools to switch to online learning and later to institute mask policies.
Pennsylvania moved last week to lift its school mask mandate, while New York and Connecticut said they are re-evaluating indoor masking policies. All three states have Democratic governors.
While U.S. coronavirus deaths are still on the rise - surpassing 900,000 on Friday - the daily number of lives lost has begun to level off, according to data collected by Reuters. During each surge in the pandemic, the rise in the death toll trails the increase in new cases.
Dr. Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University and Baltimore's former health commissioner, said lifting mask mandates was the right step.
It "marks a needed shift from government-imposed requirement to individual decision. It helps to preserve public health authority for when it's needed again," she wrote on Twitter.
The prospect of lifting the mask mandate prompted some New Jersey parents to demand transparency by decision makers, such as school board members.
"If we don’t follow state guidance on lifting mask mandate, we need to know what metrics are being used to make that determination and what metrics we need to achieve in order to drop the mask mandate," Cheryl Barkin, whose sons attend middle school and high school in New Jersey's South Orange-Maplewood School District, wrote in an email to her school board representative.
As masking policies shift, many U.S. school districts have returned to in-person learning in recent weeks, according to Burbio.com, a site that collects school calendar data. An average of 180 schools were not offering in-person instruction last week nationwide, down from some 6,000 on Jan. 14.
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