According to Governor Kathy Hochul, the state of New York is going to end a Covid mandate that has been in place for the past 28 months and requires passengers to wear masks.
She also added that airports and ride-share vehicles will no longer require passengers to wear masks inside the vehicle.
However, the governor has announced that masks are no longer required, citing recent recommendations made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States.
Ms. Hochul urged the audience to “restore some sense of normalcy” to their lives. “Masks are strongly recommended but not required.”
She went on to say that New York is in a significantly better position now due to the declining number of infections and hospitalizations.
“It has served as a constant and obvious indicator that something about this environment is not typical, and it has done so for the purpose it was intended to serve. It was beneficial to health, but things have changed significantly since then.”
In addition, the governor announced that homeless shelters and prisons will no longer be required to enforce the wearing of masks.
However, residents of nursing homes, hospitals, and other types of health care facilities that are licenced by the state are still required to wear masks.
After a federal judge in Florida ruled that the directive was unlawful, in April, President Joe Biden made the decision to stop enforcing a nationwide mask mandate on public transport, but the state of New York made the decision to continue with the rule.
Despite the fact that compliance with the mandate was widespread early on in the pandemic, many people in New York started ignoring it.
During a news conference, the Chief Executive Officer of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Janno Lieber, stated that it had become “more and more difficult to justify and to enforce a mask requirement” because so much of the city and so many other places were opening up.
At one point, New York was the region in the United States that was considered to be the epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to research conducted at Johns Hopkins University, there have been more than 6 million reported cases of the virus in the state of New York, which has resulted in the deaths of 71,222 individuals.
Approximately 78% of the state’s population has received all recommended vaccinations.
