According to The New York Times, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) will announce today that his state will soon no longer require students and school employees to wear masks.
The school mask mandate will end on March 7.
Meanwhile, Delaware Gov. John Carney announced that his state's indoor mask mandate will end on Friday. School mask mandates in Delaware will end on March 31.
However, in New Jersey, local school boards will retain the right to keep mandates in place for public schools under their jurisdiction.
The news comes as COVID cases and hospitalization have dropped precipitously in recent weeks.
Murphy will make his announcement at 1:00 p.m.
Northjersey.com reports:
The announcement will come less than a month since Murphy renewed the school mask mandate by declaring a public health emergency after the Legislature refused his authority to do so. Murphy's executive order on Jan. 11 came several hours before the mandate would have expired and left masking decisions to local school districts.
At the end of the prior school year, Murphy had said he would allow school districts to determine whether students would be required to wear a mask. But he pulled that back in late summer when COVID unexpectedly surged due to the highly contagious delta variant.
COVID hospitalizations in New Jersey have plunged by more than a third to 1,910 on Sunday from a high of 6,089 on Jan. 11. There were 1.625 new cases reported Sunday down from a high of 33,459 on Jan. 7 following a surge in testing before, during and after the December holidays.
Reporting on the evolving situation, CNN adds:
Many states led by Republican leaders never instituted school mask mandates or have rescinded them. The rapid decline of the Omicron variant over the past few weeks has also made states more comfortable dropping mask requirements.
We didn’t see a surge in COVID just because of a variant, it surged because Biden was/is sending unvaxed, un-checked illegals all over the place to cause a surge and give the Demoncraps an excuse to inflict another lock down. Fortunately, more people are getting a set of stones and telling the Government to GTH.