Onondaga County is pushing back on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan to wait until early March to determine whether to drop a mask mandate in schools. County Executive Ryan McMahon asked the state last week to come up with a number that would determine when the mandate for school children ends.
"We’ve not received those metrics. Therefore if you can’t put a metric forward, you can’t justify the mandate,” McMahon said Wednesday. “So our position at this point is that all statewide mandates need to be lifted."
This comes as COVID case numbers continue to fall across the state. And McMahon expects the number of hospitalizations in Onondaga County connected to COVID to drop below 100 by the end of the week. At this point in the pandemic, be believes it should be up to schools to decide how to carry on, based on what they are seeing, noting that students and staff could still wear masks if they want.
"This is not an emergency at this point,” he said. “This is something that’s serious. It’s something we’ve built up infrastructure to address. So to wait an additional two, three, four, five, six weeks, whatever it is, without metrics and being able to explain those metrics, I don’t think you can justify it.”
McMahon believes a mask mandate has to be balanced with other impacts of the two-year-old pandemic.
"We can’t ignore the reality that public policy over the last two years have unintended consequences,” he said. “Certainly when we look at mental health among adults and children, that’s been a significant one. When we look at what’s happened with the opioid crisis."
Hochul has said there will not be a single metric to determine mask-wearing in schools but will monitor a number of factors. She expects to make a decision in March, after children return from winter break.
