Leaders in the Washington region are facing increased political and economic pressure to quickly loosen pandemic restrictions and hasten a path toward normalcy.
While transmission rates remain high, the omicron wave has receded, leaving some residents questioning why D.C. and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs haven’t followed the lead of a half-dozen states and cities that moved to drop indoor or in-school mask rules this week.
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“It’s become performative,” Sam Lane, a 27-year-old from Bloomingdale said of mask-wearing in D.C., where patrons to many businesses must present a vaccination card to get indoors.
“You walk into a bar and you’re allowed to take it off immediately, and then walk around unmasked for the rest for the night,” Lane said. He said the mask mandate was wise when the omicron variant — and its uncertainty — was on the rise, but he now thinks it is redundant.
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District leaders are debating whether to let the city’s indoor mask mandate expire at the end of February.
“Obviously there’s a lot of political pressure because other Democratic governors are removing the mask mandate,” council member Elissa Silverman (I-At Large) said at a meeting Friday.
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Leaders of Montgomery County, the populous Maryland suburb, expect transmission to subside enough to let its mask policy lapse Feb. 21 — but not before then, despite calls for faster change.
“In high transmission, we wouldn’t have even been having this discussion before. Most everybody took steps like putting on masks in order to bring these transmission numbers down,” Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich (D) said this week. “Instead of achieving a goal such as ‘Let’s at least be a moderate transmission,’ the discussion is ‘Well, we’re moving in the right direction,’ ” he said.
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Some places, such as Prince George’s County, haven’t started the public discussion of abandoning a mandate.
Federal officials continue to recommend wearing masks indoors, regardless of vaccination status, in areas of substantial and high community transmission. As of Friday, that included all of Virginia, D.C., and Maryland except for Prince George’s County, according to federal data.
But public health experts said that with infection rates plummeting, that status is about to change.
“Maybe it’s a tiny bit premature for governments to be dropping their mask mandates,” said William A. Petri, a professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health at the University of Virginia. “Check back in a week, because it’s going to be different. … Transmission is dropping so rapidly, I fully believe we won’t be needing to wear masks indoors.”
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The District has intermittently required masks indoors during the pandemic, most recently reinstating the indoor mask mandate in late December as omicron sent cases surging to record rates. At the same time, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) introduced a new requirement that residents show proof of vaccination at restaurants and many other indoor businesses, a rule that will likely remain in effect much longer than the mask mandate.
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Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned this week against abandoning mask mandates, citing the country’s high infection rates.
“Now is not the moment,” Walensky told Reuters in an interview published Tuesday — one day after five states announced major changes in their masking policies.
“I know people are interested in taking masks off. I too am interested. That would be one marker that we have much of the pandemic behind us,” she said. “Right now, our CDC guidance has not changed..”
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Patrick Ashley, the head of emergency response for the District’s health department, called the decision to keep mandates in place “a balancing act.”
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“I think that’s the best way to put it, between strict public health science as well as … the public’s willingness to comply with behaviors that we ask them to do,” Ashley said.
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When Bowser temporarily dropped the indoor mask requirement in November, masks remained widespread in D.C. grocery stores and similar indoor spaces, regardless of legal requirements.
Many residents still wear them outdoors, too. On Friday’s unseasonably warm day, Hailey Demetrick, 16, walked her puppy Wucha down 13th Street NW in the District wearing a solid black mask she’s not about to give up any time soon.
Demetrick, a junior at Capital City High School, said she had gotten sick with covid-19 a few days before Christmas, even after getting two doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
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“If there was a possible way of getting it with the vaccine,” she said, “we’re just going to have to learn to live with it. And that means wearing masks.”
Crystal Watson, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins University, recommended that leaders wait longer before relaxing their mask mandates.
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The omicron variant has swept through the U.S. population. By some estimates, Watson noted, two out of every five Americans may have been infected by the highly contagious variant, which surged to record-breaking levels in late December and January. The variant, she said, is running out of people to infect next.
While nowhere near as high as they were a month ago, case rates are still high. According to the CDC, the District’s weekly case rate as of Friday was 253 new cases per 100,000 residents, Virginia’s was 385 and Maryland’s 143.
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The CDC defines “high” transmission as a weekly case rate above 100 and moderate transmission as below 50. Every state in the country has a high transmission rate at the moment.
Watson says the masks shouldn’t come off until a community hits moderate transmission — and despite many weeks of high transmission, she believes that point is coming soon.
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“Hopefully we’ll reach that within the next few weeks,” she said. “We shouldn’t be doing it now. We still have a lot of virus within the D.C. area, although we’ve fallen quite far from the peak of omicron. We don’t want it to jump back up. I think if we can be patient for just a few more weeks, we will get there.”
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Virginia, meanwhile, has not had an indoor mask mandate since May 2021, but former governor Ralph Northam’s administration required universal masks in schools this fall. That changed overnight in mid-January when Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) took office and immediately issued an order giving parents the choice to comply with school mask mandates, arguing that universal masking created potential harm for children. Masking is effectively optional in schools, pending several lawsuits, although about half of districts still have mandates in place.
The change reignited culture wars in the state, just as elected officials were beginning to contemplate how to move away from masks based on metrics such as infection and hospitalization rates.
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Even as omicron infections were surging, Alexandria Mayor Justin Wilson (D) said, officials understood that locking down society was not feasible and everyone would have to find a way to live with the risk of infection while taking reasonable precautions.
“The tragedy of what the governor did back in January was he polarized this entire issue again,” Wilson said. “It’s so unfortunate when we end up in these tribal camps in what is really a public health decision as to how we navigate this crisis,” Wilson added.
Rachel Chason, Teo Armus and Fenit Nirappil contributed to this report.