Beshear lifts state employee mask mandate, loosens KY’s masking recommendations
Kentucky state employees will no longer be required to mask at work beginning March 1, Gov. Andy Beshear announced on Monday.
Exceptions include congregate settings, such as Department of Veterans Affairs nursing homes and Department of Corrections buildings facilities. Otherwise, all state staff and visitors to state buildings, including executive branch buildings, can choose whether or not they’d like to mask starting Tuesday.
“State government will be transitioning from requiring our employees to wear masks, to it being optional,” Beshear said in a news update.
The state employee mask mandate, in place since last July, is one of the few remaining COVID requirements still upheld by the governor’s office, after the Republican-majority General Assembly in September stripped Beshear of his executive power to enact statewide measures to blunt virus spread.
Even though Beshear has not had the authority to mandate masking statewide or in schools since that time, the state has continued to endorse universal face coverings in all indoor settings as a way to slow spread of the virus.
But that’s changing, too.
After the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave 70% of the national population the green light on Friday to remove their masks indoors, including in schools, Kentucky is following suit; masks both in public and in schools can now be optional, said Kentucky Public Health Commissioner Steven Stack, who noted that Kentucky’s COVID metrics are “moving very quickly in the right direction.”
Rather than base its recommendations primarily off of incidence and positivity rates, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said the federal agency is now factoring COVID-hospital admissions over the previous week, the number of new cases per 100,000 people, and the percentage of beds occupied by covid patients to gauge mask necessity and community risk. Dr. Walensky left open the possibility that the CDC may revert to recommending indoor masking once again if another threatening variant emerges.
Stack and Beshear said they would align Kentucky’s risk status with the CDC’s. Based on these factors, Kentucky’s COVID-19 community level is still considered “high,” which means masks are still recommended indoors.
Beshear said he was adjusting state guidance, in part, because the virus continues to rapidly recede. The positivity rate on Monday had fallen to 8.56% statewide, with 671 new reported cases and 34 deaths. Hospitalizations also continue to decline: 962 patients with COVID are hospitalized, 203 are in an intensive care units and 112 are on ventilators.
“We want to continue to see these numbers going down, and right now there’s no reason to think they won’t,” Beshear said, adding that the approximate 400 Kentucky National Guard members still providing assistance in strapped hospitals will likely no longer be needed by March 15.
Over the last two years, Kentucky has relied on an incidence rate map — counties are green, yellow, orange, or red, based on their number of cases per population — to calculate a community’s risk. Stack said the state will retire that map in the coming days, and replace it with a map that uses covid hospitalization metrics. From there, counties can calculate their risk.
Despite the state’s shift in guidance, people can still choose to mask, Stack said. And others should consider “targeted mask use” after a COVID exposure, or when around vulnerable people.
“We have got to accept that mask use is an appropriate, reasonable, and responsible thing for vulnerable persons to do, and for people trying to protect vulnerable persons,” he said.
Vaccinations, meanwhile, are dropping off. Fewer than 1,400 people got a first dose over the weekend, and less than 2,500 got a booster, which Beshear said is “very low.”
“If there’s one negative piece of information today, it’s that our vaccination numbers are dropping about as quickly as the virus itself,” he said. Roughly 56% of the state population is fully vaccinated and 24% is boosted.
