Three US governors lift school mask rules

Three governors in the US Northeast announced Monday that they will lift mask mandates in schools as coronavirus cases and hospitalizations continue to fall across the United States.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy is removing the requirement effective March 7, while Delaware Governor John Carney is doing the same on March 31. After their announcements, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont confirmed the state won't extend the school mask mandate past Feb 28.

In New York state, where school mask mandates are set to expire on Feb 21, Governor Kathy Hochul has hinted at changing the masking requirements amid the fall in virus infections in the state. Its weekly COVID-19 case count plunged 43 percent last week.

"We'll be making some announcements in the short term as we see these numbers progressing," she said Friday, according to the New York Post.

The announcements by New Jersey, Delaware and Connecticut leave just over a dozen states, as well as the District of Columbia, that haven't ended student mask requirements.

As of Monday, about 60 percent of the top 500 school districts in the US required that students and staff wear masks in classrooms, according to the data service Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic.

The Supreme Court of Virginia on Monday rejected on procedural grounds a petition from parents seeking to invalidate Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin's executive order prohibiting schools from enforcing mask mandates in the classroom.

"Balancing public health with getting back to some semblance of normalcy is not easy," Murphy tweeted Monday in making his announcement. "But we can responsibly take this step due to declining COVID numbers and growth in vaccinations."

"This is a huge step back to normalcy for our kids," he said.

In New Jersey, there were 1,490 new daily cases reported Monday, down from a high of 33,459 on Jan 7, driven by a surge in testing around the December holidays.

The US is seeing coronavirus cases and COVID-19 hospitalizations decline or stabilize, particularly in regions like the Northeast, following a surge fueled by the Omicron variant.

New infections nationwide have plunged 61 percent since peaking less than a month ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Daily cases are averaging just over 313,000 per day, a decline from when they were averaging more than 800,000 at the height of the Omicron surge on Jan 15.

Hospitalizations also are dropping across the country, with the average number of new patients being admitted per day just under 14,000.

Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration chief, said on Face the Nation on Sunday that he expected to see more governors lift mask mandates and that we have to "try to at least make sure that students in schools have some semblance of normalcy for this spring term".

But some experts say it is too soon to end mask mandates in schools because vaccination isn't high enough among the school-age population, and new cases are being reported.

Currently, 22.6 percent of Americans ages 5 to 11 and 56.4 percent of those ages 12 to 17 are fully vaccinated against COVID, the CDC said.

"The proportion of parents who have chosen vaccination for their children is very low, and we know that masking works to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Rescinding those mandates where children 5 and up spend their days, I believe we will see rapid spread," Dr Mercedes Carnethon, vice-chair of the department of preventive medicine and a professor of epidemiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told ABC News.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.