D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) doubled down this week on relaxing the city’s indoor mask mandate, despite strident objections from a council majority who say the pre-Thanksgiving change is poorly timed and poses a risk to unvaccinated children.
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District legislators have pressed Bowser’s administration in recent weeks about how and when officials would decide to ease the rules. Those questions lingered after her announcement that most restrictions would end Monday, to the disappointment of 10 council members who sent a letter urging her to reconsider.
“[We’re] not changing course,” City Administrator Kevin Donahue told the body on Friday, pointing to the fact that nearly 74 percent of residents 18 and older are fully vaccinated — a percentage that’s even higher among seniors.
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Bowser and city health officials have remained guarded in the face of lawmakers’ scrutiny this week, including over questions about a controversial appointment to a leadership post in the city’s health department.
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When asked in recent days about specifics on lifting the mask mandate, Bowser and members of her administration have resisted pegging mitigation rules to specific benchmarks — which many jurisdictions across the region and country have done — despite publishing a set of ten metrics online every weekday for more than a year.
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The metrics — ranging from the portion of people with the virus who agree to participate in an interview with a contact tracer, to the capacity of the city’s hospitals, to the time it takes a coronavirus test to come back — each came with a color-coded level meant to signal when restrictions could relax or needed to increase.
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In practice, Bowser’s decisions were barely linked to the metrics. Some of the measuring sticks never came anywhere close to the “green” zone, which was supposed to mean regulations could wind down, even when the city’s case rate and hospital capacity otherwise looked good. Sometimes, Bowser decided to loosen restrictions or to refrain from bringing back lapsed rules, even when the metrics worsened.
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When it came to continuing the mask mandate this fall, she didn’t point to a yardstick to measure progress against. D.C. Health Director LaQuandra Nesbitt in recent weeks said repeatedly that she was monitoring many epidemiological data points and would know when it was time to recommend an end to the mask mandate.
This week, pointing to the daily case rate (which she acknowledged hasn’t budged much lately — a “plateau” well above the CDC’s recommended level for going without masks) and to the fact that vaccinated people rarely end up hospitalized with covid-19, Nesbitt simply said the time had arrived.
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“A shift in the government intervention is really necessary at this point so people can look at their own risk and make decisions about masks,” Bowser said Friday, while appearing on “The Politics Hour” with Kojo Nnamdi. “Our businesses are really looking for flexibility … their employees are telling them they want to come into offices in person, but they don’t want to have wear a mask all day.”
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Masks will still be required in some settings like Metro trains and public schools.
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Nesbitt on Tuesday announced that some metrics her department had published daily since the fall of 2020 would change or disappear. For example, coronavirus tests have reliably been returned to D.C. residents within a day or two for months, so the city doesn’t need to report the test turnaround time daily, she said.
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The District will still announce the average rate of new cases per day and will add the rate of new cases per week since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has begun using that metric to compare jurisdictions. And it will also report the daily portion of coronavirus patients who need hospitalization — which Nesbitt said will give residents a more realistic idea of their own risk.
As D.C. Council members probed further Friday on Bowser’s masking decision — which comes as neighboring Montgomery County prepares to reinstate its indoor mandate — administrators asked for patience.
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Patrick Ashley, senior deputy director at D.C. Health, called making decisions around public health an art as well as a science.
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“And that art is really about balancing policy priorities, and understanding what is the risk in the community, what is the behaviors that we are seeing in the community — things that can’t necessarily be quantified by the metric,” Ashley said.
Neil Sehgal, an assistant professor in health policy and management at the University of Maryland, said case rates will probably climb across the region in the coming weeks, and that it would have been prudent to wait until more 5-to-11-year-olds can get their second shot.
Council members in their letter noted that children between the ages of 5 and 11 became eligible for vaccination on Nov. 2, meaning they won’t be eligible for their second dose before the mandate is lifted. Just six percent of the city’s children in that age bracket had gotten a first dose, according to city data, when Bowser announced the mask change on Tuesday.
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“It continues the feeling that the mandate has been arbitrary and has been this whole time … it’s a missed opportunity to not tie the mandate to data,” Sehgal said. “I hope Mayor Bowser has the political will to keep residents safe and bring the indoor mask mandate back at that point. Am I optimistic that it’ll happen? Not so much.”
Ward 4 resident Leilah Joseph called Bowser’s decision “mind-boggling,” adding that it has frustrated her and other parents of young children who feel they haven’t been prioritized by her administration throughout the pandemic. She pointed to Nesbitt’s comments Wednesday that children younger than 5 — who cannot yet be vaccinated — are “only a small portion of the population.”
Joseph, who is pregnant and has two sons ages 3 and 6, echoed the council’s concerns. She said her eldest child has only received one shot and won’t be fully vaccinated until mid-December.
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“That’s still a month away,” she said. “If D.C. feels they’ve moving in a positive direction, just waiting another five or six weeks I think we could reduce risk for children and those who are immunocompromised, especially with the holidays coming.”
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Appearing on “The Politics Hour” Friday, Bowser said she doesn’t expect many D.C. residents to change their current behavior despite the eased restrictions. Those with small children, she said, will probably still limit travel, their social bubble and try to avoid large crowds. For herself, she will mostly continue to wear a mask indoors to protect her preschooler daughter. “That has kept me safe the last 20 months I’ve been responding in person to covid, and coming home to my child who is not eligible for vaccination.”
Council members Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2) and Christina Henderson (I-At Large) were the only members of the council not to sign the letter; they instead responded in separate statements.
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Allen said he thought it was too early to scale back the mask mandate, but thought the letter’s tone politicized the issue and Pinto said District businesses should be able to make their own decisions about mask requirements. Henderson called the lack of transparency about the decision “frustrating,” but added that she “did not support the call for a full reversal without any exceptions.”
Earlier this week, Council member Vincent C. Gray (D-Ward 7) sent a letter to Nesbitt and other members of asking about her decision to hire of ex-Philadelphia Health Commissioner Thomas Farley.
Farley resigned in Philadelphia earlier this year after admitting to ordering the cremation and disposal of human remains that belonged to victims of the 1985 MOVE police bombing, in which police dropped C-4 explosives on the headquarters of a Black radical liberation group, resulting in the deaths of six adults and five children. He also faltered in overseeing Philadelphia’s vaccine distribution, namely entrusting college students with minimal health-care experience to oversee the city’s mass vaccination site.
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“I am concerned about what appears to be a lack of racial sensitivity and how that would reflect as the lead in the District’s outreach to the community,” Gray wrote. “Particularly for African Americans who are medically underserved and experience a greater rate of co-morbidities.”
On “The Politics Hour,” Bowser said she used to live in Philadelphia and recognizes that many residents there remained scarred by the MOVE bombing. But she added that she trusted Nesbitt’s decision-making. Nesbitt, in turn, said earlier this week that she was aware of Farley’s background before hiring him — adding that cities across the nation are struggling to recruit experienced public health officials (Farley was also health commissioner in New York).
“I look forward to being able to have him get to know many of the residents of the District and many of them getting to know him as well,” she said. Gray’s office said Friday that Nesbitt agreed to meet with him about the hiring.
Mike Africa Jr., an activist and the son of two MOVE members, told The Post he was shocked by the decision to place Farley in a role where he would oversee important aspects of the city’s community health administration.
“I think the people in D.C. should be outraged, appalled, betrayed even,” Africa said. “How do you put somebody who has that type of history in that position, to be responsible for the health and wellness of people in D.C.?"
Rebecca Tan contributed to this report.