Massachusetts cities are relaxing their safety restrictions as COVID-19 cases continue to fall.
Beverly and Lowell both let their indoor mask mandates expire Wednesday night after bringing them back during the last several weeks in response to the winter surge fueled by the omicron variant. Other cities and towns are keeping a close eye on cases, vaccination rates and other metrics as they decide which mitigation efforts to employ — and which to relax — at this stage of the pandemic.
Beverly dropped its mask mandate after assessing the latest data, said Justin Jordan on Beverly’s board of health. The city brought the mandate back in early January as the omicron variant sent case rates soaring across the state. Part of the decision to let it lapse, he said, was more recent information about the omicron variant’s lesser severity and his city’s high vaccination rate.
“A mandate is certainly a strong tool that we use only when situations are particularly dire,” Jordan said. “And thankfully, we're out of that very dire situation that we were in just a little over a month ago.”
Six weeks after Lowell’s officials reinstated their mask mandate for businesses, they decided to let it expire because of falling case rates, said Lisa Golden, the city’s director of health and human services.
“We’re just trying to relax some of the things right now so that people can take a little bit of a break,” Golden said. “And I think everybody's kind of tired of COVID at this point, two years into it. So that if we do have to start talking about masks again, people will listen to us.”
Statewide, cases have fallen rapidly. Massachusetts is now reporting fewer than 3,000 new cases per day, down from single-day peaks of over 30,000 new cases in early January. But the level of transmission is still far above the lows of summer 2021, where some days fewer than 100 new cases were detected across the state.
Chelsea and Salem both reimplemented mask mandates in December as cases surged to their highest-ever levels. People in Salem are still complying with the mask mandate, said David Greenbaum, a health agent with Salem’s board of health.
“People are kind of over mask mandates,” Greenbaum said. “But I think they’re compliant because, especially when they see a surge, people are concerned and they want to protect themselves.”
There hasn’t been a statewide Massachusetts mask mandate in effect since May 2021, apart from one for public schools, creating a patchwork of masking requirements from town to town. Revere, for one, hasn’t had a mask mandate in place for businesses since 2020.
“At this time, Revere is not looking towards implementing a mandate for businesses,” Lauren Buck, Revere’s director of public health, told GBH News on Thursday. “I don’t think we’re going to move in that direction unless something drastically changes.”
But, she added, masks are still required to be worn inside municipal buildings, which Buck said more squarely falls under the mayor’s jurisdiction.
“We’re role modeling behavior, but we’re not mandating behavior for other businesses,” she said.
Officials in Beverly and Lowell both said that they would bring the mandates back if things take a turn for the worse.
