The Philadelphia Board of Health voted to again rescind the city’s mask mandate on Thursday night, just days after becoming the first major U.S. city to reinstate a mandatory masking policy.
“Due to decreasing hospitalizations and a leveling of case counts, the City will move to strongly recommending masks in indoor public spaces as opposed to a mask mandate,” a spokesperson with the Philadelphia Health Department told NBC10. “Given the latest data, the BOH voted to rescind the mandate.”
The spokesperson told the outlet that more details on the decision would be made available on Friday.
The decision came hours after Mayor Jim Kenney strongly defended the policy, which received nationwide pushback.
“I have committed through this whole dilemma, this whole pandemic, to follow the guidance of health professionals,” Kenney told the Washington Post in a video interview earlier on Thursday. “And that’s what we’re doing here.”
Philadelphia’s health department announced on April 11 that it would reinstate the city’s indoor mask mandate just over a month after lifting it, and allowed a one-week education period for businesses, with masks required in all indoor public spaces, including schools and child-care settings, stores, restaurants, and government buildings, as of April 18.
“This is our chance to get ahead of the pandemic,” Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said at a news conference announcing the decision to reinstate the mandate earlier this month.
The decision to enforce mask wearing went against guidance issued by the CDC, as the city had a “low” Covid-19 community level under the agency’s parameters, which take into account hospital admissions and other benchmarks. Areas with a low community level are not advised to require masking under the CDC’s new guidelines.
Bettigole defended the policy earlier this month, saying that “local conditions do matter” in making such decisions.
“We’ve all seen here in Philadelphia, how much our history of redlining, history of disparities has impacted, particularly our Black and brown communities in the city,” she said. “And so it does make sense to be more careful in Philadelphia, than, you know, perhaps in an affluent suburb.”
The mask mandate was triggered by the city reaching its “Level 2” designation under its Covid-19 response plan. The city had been at “Level 1” since the beginning of March, a designation that means most mitigation measures, including indoor mask mandates and proof-of-vaccination requirements in restaurants, can be lifted.
However, Level 2 means that average new daily case counts and hospitalizations are low but “cases have increased by more than 50 percent in the previous 10 days.” A spokesman for the health department told the New York Times that over the ten days preceding the mandate’s reinstatement, the average number of new cases had risen nearly 70 percent.