Doctors, hospital leaders: Washington not ready to end indoor mask mandate
Feb 13, 2022, 8:08 AM | Updated: Feb 14, 2022, 8:42 am
(Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images)
(Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images)
Governor Jay Inslee plans to announce within the next week when Washington state will lift its indoor mask mandate. But doctors and hospital leaders at the Washington State Hospital Association’s most recent briefing on Tuesday said they did not believe the state is ready to take that step yet.
Washington’s outdoor mask mandate, which applies to large events of more than 500 people — such as festivals and ball games — will end Friday, Feb. 18. But when it comes to indoor masking, Washington is one of three states — Hawaii and New Mexico being the other two — to have no mandate end date in sight.
Washington superintendent calls for end to school mask mandate
“We still have over 100 people per 100,000 people having COVID every day, so I think it’s too soon at this point in this surge,” said Dr. Shaquita Bell, a pediatrician with Seattle Children’s, during the WSHA briefing.
She said she was comfortable with ending the mandate when the state gets down to that level — but as of Feb. 11, Washington is at about 13 times that metric, with just under 1,300 new cases for every 100,000 residents.
Inslee said during a press conference Wednesday that he did not plan to lift the mandate right away, but rather when case, hospitalization, and death rates are low enough that it would be safe to do so.
Similarly, Oregon Governor Kate Brown announced this week that the indoor mask mandate there will lift by the end of March.
But Cassie Sauer, president and CEO of WSHA, did not agree with making such an announcement so far ahead of time.
“Making a plan for a month or two months from now just doesn’t seem wise,” Sauer said. “It also seems like that’s the kind of decision you could make fast. You don’t have to set up infrastructure to remove masks out of schools. You could just say, ‘We’ve seen the cases decline — starting next week, we’re not going to require masks any longer.'”
Dr. Kunal Joshi with Overlake Medical Center pointed out that we thought the pandemic was over last summer and again in the fall — only to be surprised each time with new variants and ensuing surges. He suggested proceeding with prudence.
“We get excited because we want our lives back — I get that,” Joshi said. “But I think we should take into account what happened in June, and what happened in September.”
