The Alabama governor said she would extend the current term of the state’s mask until April 9 and then suspend the order.
Governor Kay Ivey said on Thursday that the extension is to allow companies time to implement their own policies and make necessary adjustments before the deadline.
According to the current request, masks are required in public whenever someone is less than 2 meters from another individual from a different residence. Facial coverage is also required in schools and colleges, both for employees and for second graders and above.
But once the order ends on April 9, the masks will no longer be mandatory.
“There is no doubt that wearing masks has been one of my greatest tools in combating the spread of the virus,” Ivey told a news conference on Thursday.
“And even when we remove the order from the masks, I will continue to wear my mask while I am around other people and I strongly urge my fellow citizens to use common sense and do the same thing. But at that moment, it will become a matter of personal responsibility. and not a government mandate, “she continued.
The governor said the state maintained the order of the masks for a “generous period of time”.
Ivey’s announcement came days after the governors of Texas and Mississippi announced that they would suspend their states’ mask mandates and reverse many of their Covid-19 health requirements. All three governors are Republicans.
“Now is the time to open Texas 100 percent,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said on Tuesday. “Covid has not suddenly disappeared, but state mandates are no longer needed.”
Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves said in a tweet that he thought it was time to suspend the order because “our hospitalizations and the number of cases have plummeted and the vaccine is being quickly distributed”.
“Executive orders that interfered in people’s lives were the worst, but the only possible interventions for much of last year,” said Reeves in another tweet. “Now, we are putting our focus on rapid vaccine distribution. We are going out of the business of telling people what they can and cannot do ”.
The term ended in the state on Wednesday.
Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, expressed concern about the reversal of coronavirus mandates across states.
“Please listen to me clearly,” she said at a Covid-19 briefing at the White House this week, “at this level of cases with propagation of variants, we can completely lose the ground we have conquered with difficulty.”
According to the latest data from NBC News, more than 26 million people have been fully vaccinated after authorization for emergency use was granted for two vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna.
