County Mayor Jim Coppinger announced Monday that the mask mandate will be extended until the end of April, when it will permanently end.
"After much discussion and consideration, I will ask the Health Department to extend the mask mandate until April 28 of 2021,” Mayor Coppinger said. “However, the mask mandate will be lifted and will end on April 29.”
He said the number of cases and hospitalizations have steadily declined over the last few months.
He said the most important factor in lifting the mask mandate was the availability of vaccines, and the extra month will allow more citizens to be vaccinated. Mayor Coppinger said the mask mandates helped control the spread of COVID-19 among Hamilton County residents.
“I can’t express in enough ways how important it is to be vaccinated, and there should not be any hesitancy to get vaccinated,” Mayor Coppinger said. “It’s a personal choice each of us has to make, and I personally have been vaccinated, and most of the staff have been too. We know it offers a lot of effective protection.”
He said the 30-day window also allows businesses time to adjust to the removal of the mask mandate. He said when it comes to the ages of those being infected by the virus, the average age of those infected has gone down as older citizens are vaccinated.
He asked those who have not been vaccinated to continue to social distance and be cautious until they are vaccinated.
Mayor Coppinger said the vaccine appointments are booked for the next few weeks, but that they should eventually get additional doses. Mayor Coppinger said Hamilton County and its various partners have administered 152,468 vaccines to Hamilton County residents, with around 15 percent of those being the one-shot Johnson and Johnson version of the vaccine.
“I just want to take this opportunity to praise all of our Health Department and leadership like Becky Barnes, and the ones on the front lines who are putting shots in arms,” Mayor Coppinger said. “They’ve been at this since March 13 of last year.”
The mayor said there will be people who will be disappointed with the decision to lift the mask mandate in a month, and those who did not want the mask mandate in the first place. He said he and the Health Department believed they made and are making the right decisions, and continue to urge people to remain cautious.
“During the next 30 days, let’s do all we can to prevent ourselves from getting this highly contagious virus,” the mayor said. “Together we’ve come a long way since last March to get where we are, so we don’t want to take any steps backwards.”