Can Raleigh relax mask mandate and still be COVID safe? The mayor wants to find out.
Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin wants to see if the city can relax its mask mandate and still keep people safe from COVID-19.
She’s asked staff to look at ways to ease restrictions for gyms and small retail businesses after hearing from residents and businesses struggling with the mandate.
“I’m struggling with this because I’m trying to find balance,” she said at a recent Raleigh City Council meeting. “And I’m hoping after staff researches this, we can make some adjustments based on what we’re seeing other communities do.”
On Friday she said the city has no timeline.
“They are doing research, or we’ll be doing research on that to see if there’s a way we can, I don’t know, balance this a little,” Baldwin said. “We’re dealing with COVID. But we’re also dealing with people whose health is being impacted, because they cannot work out, they don’t feel comfortable working out.”
During the City Council meeting, Baldwin said she’s spoken to business owners who worry they won’t make it until next year. But the city is waiting to see if COVID-19 numbers begin to rise two weeks after Thanksgiving, she said.
Raleigh is one of six municipalities in Wake County with a mask mandates Masks are required in Garner, Knightdale, Morrisville, Rolesville and Zebulon, as well as in the unincorporated parts of the county.
On Thursday, Wake County Commissioners Chair Sig Hutchinson said county staff were discussing the mandate but that he didn’t expect an update. Hutchinson was named the board’s chairman this week after Matt Calabria’s one-term ended. It’s up to the chair of the commissioners and mayors to impose mask mandates in their jurisdictions..
Stacy Beard, spokesperson for Wake County, said the county is still in the red zone in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data tracker.
“The mandate can be safely lifted when the trending positivity rate of COVID-19 is less than 5% and the seven-day average is less than 50 cases per 100,000 people, marking moderate community transmission per the CDC,” she said.
Wake County has a new dashboard that shows vaccination and positivity rates for each municipality in the county.
None of Wake County’s municipalities is below 50 cases per 100,000 people, though Morrisville comes closest with 81 cases. Wendell and Wake Forest have the highest rate of cases per 100,000 people: 330.7 and 337.3 respectively.
The percentage of fully vaccinated residents, including all age groups, ranges from 74% of people in Apex to 41% of people in Zebulon.
Only four municipalities are below the 5% positivity rate the state has said it needs to help contain the virus: Cary, Fuquay-Varina, Knightdale and Morrisville.
This story was originally published December 10, 2021 at 4:40 PM.
