Philly’s mask mandate ends, marking a step closer to normal but drawing mixed reactions

Philadelphia ended its indoor mask mandate Wednesday, signaling a big step toward normalcy in the city after almost two years of pandemic lockdowns and restrictions.

The pandemic has reached a new stage, Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said, though she hesitated to call COVID-19 endemic, or at a manageable, baseline level rather than an epidemic level.

“I think talking about regaining as much normal life as we can ... is better framing for me,” she said. “I’m hoping we have enough immunity in the city that we really are at an end point.”

Philadelphia was the only place in the state still maintaining a general indoor-masking requirement. That mandate began June 26, 2020, and has been in place continuously, except from June to August 2021.

The announcement came a day after President Joe Biden unveiled a new strategy to emphasize preventing and treating COVID, the Washington Post reported, including a “test to treat” plan that would provide antivirals immediately to those testing positive.

The city anticipated it would also end the requirement for children to wear masks in schools on March 9, if the metrics keep moving downward.

The mask mandate will return for schools for a week after spring break — April 18 through 22 — to mitigate the risk from people who may have caught COVID during vacation. Staff and students in pre-K and Head Start will still be required to wear masks; children 5 and younger are not yet eligible for vaccination.

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan said he “fully and wholeheartedly supports” a plan to go mask optional but said clearer information was needed.

“There are people — children and staff — who may have health conditions, and they need the mask in order to help protect themselves,” he said.

Mask mandates in city government buildings will remain in place until Monday, and unvaccinated staff will still have to mask indoors.

The city is still requiring masks in health-care and congregant-living settings, and federal rules require masking on public transit.

» READ MORE: Living with risk: Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, these five people share how their survival strategies have evolved.

But most businesses no longer will have to enforce COVID safety protocols.

“Each of us now are responsible for our own risk and the risk we take for the people we love,” Bettigole said.

As they left Taqueria Amor in Manayunk, Shayla Davis and Tashanna Walker said they agreed with the city’s decision. Wearing masks is “just a hassle,” especially at the gym, Walker said.

”I feel like people think that [COVID] is dying down,” said Davis, 25, of West Oak Lane. “Everybody just feels safer.”

Medical students Claire Becker and Grace Hogan still will have to wear masks at work, but they carried their masks as they walked down Manayunk’s Main Street on Wednesday afternoon. The Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine students were surprised by the “suddenness” of the city’s policy change but said they understood it, particularly as warmer weather means better ventilation and more outdoor activity.

”OK with it, as long as people are prepared to wear masks again if there’s another spike,” said Becker, 24. “I hope people don’t get too comfortable.”

For some, the change isn’t welcome.

“I feel uncomfortable going out now around groups of people,” said Alexandra Hackett, 44, of Philadelphia, who has experienced symptoms of long COVID for almost two years, “and it’s a really awful place to be emotionally.”

An influential voice on social media groups for people with long COVID, she has heard accounts of people getting worse after suffering a second bout of COVID.

“Are you going to end up worse than you are now or is it going to reverse any progress you made?” she asked.

Some parents, too, are concerned.

“I feel very conflicted. He doesn’t want to wear a mask and I get that,” said Holly Lau of her 12-year-old son. But she was dismayed to hear the school mandate will end. “Masks do not hinder his ability to be in a learning environment.”

Lau, of West Philadelphia, has an autoimmune condition, and was worried about how ending the school mandate will affect children with such health issues.

“We all are eager to get to a place where we’re not wearing masks, but I just question the timing,” she said.

City businesses have been complaining that they were losing trade to suburban counties, where no such restrictions were still in place.

“I think it’s great,” said Alex Balloon, part-time executive director of the Tacony Community Development Corporation, and executive director of the Passyunk Avenue Revitalization Corporation. “It’s great to see the city of Philadelphia match our neighbors, and i think it’s great news for people in leisure and hospitality.”

Live! Casino and Hotel on Packer Avenue opened in January 2021, and except for last summer’s eased masking rules, has operated entirely under COVID restrictions.

“I know we’ll be operating as we intended the property to operate going forward,” said Joe Billhimer, the casino’s general manager.

The casino is owned by the Cordish Companies, which also operates a casino in Westmoreland.

“We’ve just seen kind of max volume in our Westmoreland facility without the restrictions,” he said. “Whereas here we’ve seen good volumes but not over the top.”

Businesses and restaurants can still choose to require masks or proof of vaccination from customers. Bettigole emphasized that COVID was still circulating, and recommended people wear masks in large crowds or around vulnerable or unvaccinated people. The Kimmel Center announced Wednesday it was among those that will continue requiring face masks and proof of vaccination.

» READ MORE: Here’s where you still need a mask in Philly

“I don’t know about you, but it’s really hard for me to forget January, and what hit Philadelphia in January, and just massive numbers of cases and deaths,” Bettigole said. “I am very hesitant to say it’s over.”

The mask mandate ended just two weeks after the city introduced its own benchmarks for COVID-19 safety restrictions. That system used data about cases, hospitalizations, positivity rates, and the rate of rise in cases to determine needed restrictions. Three of the four conditions had to be met before masking could end: average daily cases dropping under 100; fewer than 50 people being hospitalized with COVID; a test positivity rate under 2%; and cases not rising by more than 50% within the past 10 days.

Health officials had estimated it might be a few weeks before masks could come off.

That changed, though, when the city began including antigen test results to calculate the positivity rate, Bettigole said Wednesday. Previously, the city had only included PCR tests, but with the change the city’s positivity rate dropped to 1.7%, meeting the standard to end the mask mandate.

The city had been relying on PCR tests, often called the “gold-standard test,” because at one point negative antigen results had to be confirmed with a PCR test. As they’ve become more frequently used, Bettigole said, ignoring them has skewed the positivity rate. The increased popularity of the rapid antigen tests performed at home and largely not reported to health officials, also has made publicly available positivity rates less reliable. Positivity rates upped slighted over the past week, even as case counts dropped.

“We were trying to unpack why that positivity was staying stuck when cases continued to decline,” Bettigole said. “It didn’t really make sense to us.”

» READ MORE: Philly's new COVID system makes it hard to stay unmasked. We crunched the numbers.

The CDC’s changed recommendations Friday didn’t prompt the city to rethink its own benchmarks, health department spokesperson James Garrow said.

“We made the change today in response to our own internal investigation and double checking, and questions from the public,” he said.

The difference between a positivity rate of 2.6%, as the data showed earlier before the antigen tests were included, and the new rate, is virtually nonexistent in terms of real risk, one epidemiologist said.

“The change happens over longer periods of time, from weeks to months,” said Neal Goldstein, of Drexel University. “That’s a change that doesn’t really have any bearing on anybody’s individual risk.”

Goldstein has been critical of the city’s benchmarks, saying the thresholds are largely arbitrary.

As of Tuesday, Bettigole said, the city was averaging 87 new cases a day with 156 people in hospitals testing positive for the virus.

Bettigole noted that the health department wasn’t fully adopting the federal recommendations.

“The specific metrics they’re suggesting feel risky for Philadelphia,” she said. “Our team looked back, and found that if we had been following the CDC’s model in Philadelphia this fall, we would have remained unmasked throughout the delta wave.”

Health officials have said it is possible that mandates, including the mask requirement and proof of vaccination to eat indoors, could return if a new variant emerges or Philadelphia experiences another surge. Though the health department’s Wednesday announcement marked a change in mandates, typically it will wait until Mondays to announce any mandate shifts, Bettigole said.

“I think we should enjoy the good parts when they’re here,” she said, “and we should stay aware and be careful of what could still be to come.”

Staff writers Justine McDaniel and Kristen Graham contributed to this story.