On Friday, March 5, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster announced that masks are no longer needed inside public buildings or inside restaurants when you are not eating or drinking. However, local ordinances still apply. For example, masks are still needed in Charleston. Charleston attorney Susan Herdina issued the following statement on March 6: “As Governor McMaster’s latest order makes clear, local mask laws continue to apply in local jurisdictions. Therefore, the Charleston city mask requirement remains in effect, including in our bars and restaurants. ”
Although cases of coronavirus across the state have slowly declined, experts warned that loosening restrictions can now be catastrophic. At a White House press conference on March 1, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control, said a fourth wave is possible if states reverse the restrictions.
“With these statistics, I am really concerned that more states are revoking the exact public health measures that we recommend to protect people in Covid-19,” she said. “Please, listen to me clearly: in this level of cases with propagation of variants, we can completely lose the ground conquered with so much effort.”
With the possibility for diners to arrive in bars and restaurants without masks, it is good that South Carolina food and beverage workers are now included as frontline workers with the greatest occupational risk. On March 8, the state launched phase 1b of its COVID-19 vaccination plan. This category includes people who cannot do their jobs at home and have an occupation that exposes them to other people. The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control states this as,
Frontline workers with increased occupational risk are people who:
Must be in person at your workplace, and
Perform work that puts them at increased risk of exposure due to frequent, close (less than 6 feet) and continuous (more than 15 minutes) contact with other people in the work environment
Examples of frontline workers include, but are not limited to, school staff and daycare centers, manufacturing workers, grocery workers, police, etc.
Until publication, 771,516 South Carolina residents started the vaccination process. Many of the newly qualified are frustrated by the lack of available vaccines and the constant updating process of the sites to see if they have opened vacancies in pharmacies and other places that offer the vaccine.
• Governor McMaster loosens COVID-19 rules on face masks in state buildings, restaurants [The State]
• Director of CDC ‘Really Concerned’ with States Reverting Covid Security Measures [CNN]
• South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control [Official]