Palm Beach County schools' mask mandate is here for at least 1 more month. Here’s why.
Andrew Marra
A steady decline in new COVID-19 cases means Palm Beach County’s public schools may be getting closer to making masks optional for students.
But lifting the mask mandate is still, at best, several weeks away.
School district administrators announced Oct. 6 they would stop requiring students to wear facial coverings once three conditions are met:
- The weekly case positivity rate remains below 8% for four consecutive weeks.
- COVID-19 vaccines are available for children ages 5 and up.
- The average weekly number of new cases in the county stays below 50 per 100,000 residents (about 750 cases overall) for four consecutive weeks.
The good news: One of those conditions is already being met. The weekly positivity rate has been below 8% for more than a month. For the week ending Oct. 14, it stood at 4.1%.
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Vaccine approval for schoolchildren nears
Another encouraging sign: Completing the second condition — that vaccines be “available” for young children — appears to be just weeks away. Emergency approval of the Pfizer vaccine for children 5 and up could come from the federal Food and Drug Administration before the end of the month, The New York Times reported.
In their Oct. 6 presentation to school board members, district administrators did not say how they would define "available" for the purposes of lifting the mandate. But Keith Oswald, the district's chief of equity and wellness, said in an interview that they would consider that requirement fulfilled once vaccines are generally available locally.
County health officials, he said, are already working to make sure local agencies and medical offices have child vaccines ready to go quickly once emergency approval is granted, meaning they could be available as soon as the first half of November.
“We’re working on a plan to really roll that out immediately,” he said.
Rate of new COVID cases appears to be biggest challenge
But none of that will matter until the number of new COVID-19 cases drops substantially.
For the week ending Oct. 14, the number of new cases totaled 1,430 — or 96.2 per 100,000 residents, according to the state Department of Health. That’s nearly double the school district’s threshold of 50 cases per 100,000 residents.
There's good news, though: that rate has been falling dramatically. In a month’s time it has plummeted by two-thirds, from 307 for the week ending Sept. 16 to just 96 as of Oct. 14. That change includes an 18% drop over the last week.
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Officials are optimistic that the downward trend will continue in the short term, though they worry it could tick back up as the holiday season begins. If new cases do fall below 50 per 100,000, they will have to stay below the threshold for four consecutive weeks under the district’s plan.
That means a repeal of the mask mandate is at least a month away, and likely longer. There is an important caveat, too: A repeal of the mask mandate is not permanent, administrators say.
If case numbers or the positivity rate creep back up over the district’s threshold, officials said they plan to reinstate the mandate, meaning parents and students could expect at least another month of mask requirements.
But there is still another piece of good news: As cases have fallen, so too has the number of students required to stay home in quarantine. At one point in August, more than 5,000 school district students were required to isolate at home because they either had tested positive for COVID-19 or had been in close contact with someone who did.
This week, that number fell below 300 for the first time, a decline of roughly 95% from August's peak.