With COVID-19 cases rising once again, New York City is keeping a mask mandate for children under 5 in place and will appeal a judge’s ruling that struck it down, Mayor Eric Adams announced Friday.
City health officials are recommending that everyone cover their faces in indoor public settings and will continue to require masks for children aged 2 to 4 in schools and daycare centers, Adams said.
Adams had said previously that the mask mandate for young children would be lifted on April 4 if coronavirus numbers remained low.
New York City is now averaging just under 1,300 new cases of COVID-19 per day, more than twice the number on the average day in early March. Hospitalizations from the virus, though, have not been climbing, and health officials have increasingly been looking at that metric to determine what level of public precautions are needed.
But Dr. Ashwin Vasan, the newly appointed New York City health commissioner, said the higher case counts due to the omicron subvariant BA.2 mean the mask rule for children under 5 will remain in place for now. “Cases are definitively rising and it’s gotten our attention,” said Vasan, who joined Adams at a COVID-19 briefing.
Adams, a Democrat, said the city would appeal a ruling on Friday from a Staten Island judge voiding the mask mandate for young children. Judge Ralph Porzio called the mandate “arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable.”
(AP)
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5 Responses
Corona will only attack children 2-4 as per Mayor Adam’s but not per the judge. S
Great news that their heeding the health officials advice!
Would the good doctor like to comment on the statistics over the past 2 years showing rates if infection and transmission among 2-4 year olds? If he won’t. Because 2-4 year old, for the most part, have not been infected nor transmit COVID in any serious way. So it’s ok to lift the ban on sports teams, but the little kids must continue to suffer.
Crazy. We’ve known since the beginning of this that the Wuhan virus is NOT DANGEROUS for young children. Even if they catch it, it’s no worse for them than a bad cold. Kids die of those once in a while too; or they die of something else while having a bad cold.
We also know now that the vaccine does not prevent people from catching the virus, or from spreading it. So an unvaccinated child is no more likely to be spreading the virus than is a fully-vaccinated adult. And yet the adult can go barefaced while the child must wear a face-diaper. Call this what it is: Child abuse.
Rishus