NJ School Mask Mandate Could Be Dropped Before June: Murphy

NEW JERSEY — Gov. Phil Murphy said Thursday morning on PIX 11 he thinks there is "a real shot" he will drop the mask mandate in New Jersey schools before the school year ends in June.

"Do you foresee sometime in 2022, because it is a great time, because the numbers are going down — they're still high, but they are trending down — that we might see no masks in a school setting sometime this school year?" asked the PIX 11 reporter.

“Yes, I think there’s a real shot of that,” Murphy replied. "I really do. So fingers crossed. I don’t mean this calendar year. You’re speaking about the school year that ends in June. I think there’s a real shot of that."

Murphy's executive order mandating masks in schools was going to expire Jan. 11, and he previously said he would need a majority approval from the state Legislature to extend it. However, last Tuesday, the same day the mask order was supposed to expire, Murphy declared a new state of emergency, which allowed him to extend the K-12 mask mandate without legislative approval.

Murphy cited the omicron surge of December and early January, where New Jersey logged its highest case numbers in the history of the pandemic, as the reason for it.

However, now COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are continuing to drop daily. On Thursday, 10,072 new positive cases were reported, which is significantly lower than the state's pandemic record of 33,479 cases on Jan. 7. Hospitalizations have also dropped 18 percent compared to their peak, reported NJ.com.

Murphy acknowledged Thursday morning on PIX 11 that New Jersey is starting to "turn a corner."

“We're early days in terms of turning the corner. But it certainly looks like we’ve begun to turn the corner here,” he said. “God willing, we keep that progress up. Hopefully, we get some weather that's more hospitable, we can live a little bit more of our lives outside."

When the school year started in September, 16 U.S. states had school mask mandates and they were primarily either on the West or East coasts and led by Democratic governors: California, Oregon, Washington, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Virginia. However, PA and Virginia have both since removed their statewide mask mandate, and allowed local school districts and towns to decide if school students should wear masks.

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This article originally appeared on the Middletown Patch