Children 4 years old and younger will soon no longer be required to wear masks in public schools and day care facilities, Mayor Eric Adams announced Tuesday, following weeks of pressure to nix the controversial rule.
During a press conference, Adams said that the face-covering mandate for the Big Apple’s youngest will be removed beginning April 4, if current COVID-19 trends persist.
“If the numbers continue to show a low level of risk, masks will be optional for 2-to-4-year-old students in schools and daycare,” he told reporters at City Hall. “We want to see our babies’ faces.”
“Now it’s time to peel back another layer.”
The announcement comes after earlier in March Adams removed the indoor face covering requirement for children in kindergarten through 12th grades, while maintaining it for early-education students and those in day care centers ages 4 and under, because they are not yet eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
Data compiled by the American Academy of Pediatrics shows that just 0.1 percent to 1.5 percent of child COVID cases resulted in hospitalization and 0.00 percent to 0.01 percent resulted in deaths.
New York City public school students ages 5 and older have not been required to wear a mask since March 7, when kids celebrated the end of not being able to see their friends’ faces.
On Sunday, parents and students protested the mask mandate for younger students in City Hall Park, where they implored the mayor to “unmask our toddlers.” Weeks earlier, more than 20 top early education programs in the Big Apple signed a letter this week calling on Adams to end masking mandates for 2- to 4-year-olds.
The demonstration came a day after the city’s new health commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, said he believes mask mandates for young children should be indefinitely maintained, after the mayor hinted March 7 he would soon “come back and visit” the mask mandate for young pupils. But on Tuesday, Vasan endorsed Adam’s decision, while he cautioned the regulations could be revisited.
“Less risk means more choices for New Yorkers about which precautions are mandatory and which are optional,” he told reporters. “If we see the levels of risk rise, either before or after the mandate is lifted, we may be here having another conversation.”
“However, right now, we feel comfortable saying that if the risk level holds, masks can become optional for our youngest New Yorkers,” Vasan added.
On Monday, the state’s top doctor, Mary Bassett, told reporters she doesn’t predict a “surge” in COVID-19 cases despite the recent spread of the highly contagious Omicron subvariant BA.2.
The New York state coronavirus positivity rate on Monday was 2 percent — down from 23 percent in January amid the winter Omicron surge, Gov. Kathy Hochul said. The seven-day average on Sunday was 1.87 percent, according to state data.
In the five boroughs, the seven-day average as of Monday is a downward-trending 1.66, according to city data.
Meanwhile, Adams said it isn’t yet time to lift the city’s private-sector worker vaccine mandate — a policy in place since Dec. 27 that prohibits unvaccinated, New York City-based professional athletes from playing at their home fields and courts.
“We’re going to do it in layers, and when we feel that it’s the right time to look at that — if we do so at all — because the work environment is an important environment, we’re going to make that determination,” he told reporters. “We’re not there yet.”
Adams said Wednesday that athletes who haven’t been inoculated against the coronavirus isn’t a top concern for him — explaining he’s looking out for the health of the Big Apple’s entire population and that he would remove COVID-19-related regulations on his own timeline, not one dictated by professional sports teams’ schedules.
He also promised to come up with a “solution” for pro baseball players who have declined to receive a shot.
“They have to have to wait to find out what we’re going to do,” he said Tuesday morning.