State Plans To Bring End To Mask Mandate In Schools To Restore Normalcy Amid COVID-19

New Jersey will begin moving towards rescinding its mask mandate for students and teachers to help provide some sense of normalcy in schools, the state’s governor told the New York Times. Murphy is expected to announce the policy on Monday.

Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) presided over the deadliest phase of the COVID-19 pandemic when it began to spread across the world in 2020. Like its neighbor New York, New Jersey saw a staggering number of deaths and hospitalizations which drove Murphy into adopting one of the harshest stances nationwide to contain the virus.

But with cases of COVID-19 in the state trickling downward from 31,173 daily average cases on Jan. 7 to 3,003 as of Sunday, according to the NYTimes coronavirus data tracker, Murphy has signaled that the time has come for New Jersey to begin easing restrictions.

Currently, students and teachers are both required to wear a mask in class.

"The overwhelming sentiment on both sides of the aisle is we want to get to a place where we can live with this thing in as normal a fashion as possible," Murphy said last week after a meeting of U.S governors at the White House.

Murphy’s decision follows other governors who have also begun to prioritize co-existence with COVID-19 while still encouraging vaccinations and boosters.

Republican-led states acted sooner to rescind mask mandates, but they sparked concern by banning schools from requiring either masks or vaccines that experts warned undermined public safety. Democratic governors have generally held firm to the position that science will guide their public health decisions, but they have been left to grapple with voters exhausted by the pandemic’s limitations on daily life.

In December, Gov. Thomas Wolf (D-Penn.) said that he had no plans to reintroduce mandates in Pennsylvania but would instead continue encouraging vaccinations. New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul has said previously that she would follow the data before making a final decision on whether or not to end the state mask mandate in schools.