Philadelphia already called for an end to the mask mandate the reimplemented just last week due to a decrease in Covid hospitalizations.
Days after Philadelphia became the first major U.S. city to reinstate an indoor mask mandate, the Board of Health voted to rescind the mandate. The Philadelphia health department cited a “decreasing hospitalizations and a leveling of case counts.”
Covid hospitalizations peaked at 82 people on Sunday, dropped to 77 on Monday, 74 on Tuesday, and 65 on Wednesday.
“That’s clearly not a rise in hospitalizations, and I think it just doesn’t justify keeping a mandate in place when we don’t need one,” Bettigole said during a press conference on Friday.
Philly Health Commissioner Dr. Cheryl Bettigole said at the time that coronavirus cases had increased by more than 50% in a 10-day period over the week before, warning of the possibility of a “new COVID wave.”
“I suspect that this wave will be smaller than the one we saw in January,” Bettigole said at a press conference last week announcing the Philadelphia mask measure. “But if we wait to find out and to put our masks back on, we’ll have lost our chance to stop the wave.”
Nobody else followed the city’s lead knowing they would face massive backlash and the fact that masks haven’t helped during the pandemic.
When confronted about the flip-flopping on mandates, Bettigole attempted to defend the health department’s actions.
“This is not a temporary back and forth that we’re doing,” Bettigole insisted. She claimed without providing evidence that people obeying the mask mandate over the last five days contributed to the decrease in hospitalizations.
“What looks like happened after that announcement on the 11th is that people actually did take heed. There’s not a way that we would have seen a decrease in hospitalization we’re seeing over the course of this week just based on enforcement starting on the 18th,” she said.
“We don’t feel like the mandate is necessary at this point. We’re not saying, hey, we’re out of the metrics, we could go back next week. We’re saying we’re not mandating at this point, which means we’re not using that ability to kind of trigger a mandate based on the metrics we announced in February.”
Keep standing up to the tyranny and do not comply.
