Top Democrats renewed their calls for an indoor mask mandate Thursday as the Department of Health reported 591 cases of the coronavirus, a new pandemic high that shattered the record set just last week by nearly 100 cases.
“We are approaching the holiday season. The weather is getting cold. We know that masks work,” House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, said in an interview. “And this is why again, I’m asking the governor to please, please, please put a mask mandate in place.”
“When things aren’t working, strong leaders do not stick their heads in the sand,” Senate Pro Tem Becca Balint, D-Windham, echoed in a statement. A mask mandate should be tied to local transmission rates, she said. (Such a measure is in place in Nevada.)
Vermont also reported a record number of COVID-19 cases in K-12 schools this week. And like many parents across the state, Balint said her own child is home from school this week after exposure in class.
“We used to say early in the pandemic, we’re all in this together. But I can tell you right now, families with small children absolutely do not believe that anymore. Because it doesn’t feel like it,” Balint said in an interview.
Krowinski and Balint also once again defended their decision earlier this fall not to reconvene the Legislature in October, as initially planned, to try to pass their own mask policy. Krowinski argued the special session had been tentatively scheduled to respond to a federal infrastructure bill and that it would have been inappropriate to shoehorn in COVID-19 measures.
“Every indication was that (Scott) was going to veto it, and we didn’t believe we had the votes to override the veto,” Balint said. “So I don’t regret it.”
Gov. Phil Scott has consistently resisted calls to reimpose a mask mandate, arguing that while masking works to prevent viral spread, a mandate would have only a marginal impact on compliance. A spokesperson reiterated this Thursday.
“We can achieve the same goals with education and encouragement, which is a more effective strategy for the long-term management of this virus and at this phase of the pandemic,” wrote Rebecca Kelley, Scott’s communications director.
But the governor’s critics point to Nevada, one of the few states to have re-introduced such a mandate, where survey data suggests starkly higher rates of masking than in Vermont.
Still, while Scott has not ceded to demands that he impose any new restrictions, his rhetoric markedly changed in certain ways.
For much of the Delta wave, the governor and administration officials have even been reluctant to urge the vaccinated to mask indoors, even as the CDC updated its recommendations. Encouragements to mask have typically come with caveats. The vaccinated, for example, might “consider” masking indoors if they were immunocompromised, Health Commissioner Mark Levine said in August, or if they had unvaccinated children.
But on Tuesday, for the first time in months, Scott and other administration officials wore masks during the governor’s weekly news conference. And citing straining ICU capacity, they urged all Vermonters — regardless of vaccination status — to mask indoors. The governor is also encouraging people not to gather in large groups, and to test and mask when visiting older adults or medically vulnerable people.
People vaccinated against Covid-19 are much less likely to be infected and suffer severe outcomes. And despite recent case counts smashing previous records, hospitalizations and deaths are still hovering below the records set before widespread vaccination. But hospitalizations are high and climbing. The state reported 53 people were hospitalized with the virus on Thursday. At its peak last winter, the state reported 65 hospitalizations.
Kelley added that the administration is also exploring more widely deploying rapid antigen tests, which experts have increasingly pressed the public and governments to adopt to catch cases early. Unlike PCR tests, where results take at least a day to return, at-home antigen tests provide an immediate turnaround. The problem? In the U.S., such tests are scarce and expensive.
“If we can address the supply issue, this will be a critical strategy moving forward,” Kelley wrote. The holidays are right around the corner, and Scott will also be issuing recommendations about Thanksgiving next Tuesday, she added.
Lt. Gov. Molly Gray, a Democrat who enjoys a close working relationship with the Republican governor, did not proactively release a statement about the day’s record.
But when asked, her spokesperson, Andrew Gillespie, wrote in a brief email that Gray “continues to support all measures necessary to keep Vermonters safe and to decrease community spread, including a statewide masking policy, expanded access to testing with rapid results, as well as vaccinations and boosters for all eligible Vermonters.”
Pressed about the governor’s reticence to implement a mask mandate, Gillespie wrote that Gray had no further comment.