From DailyWire.com…
Philadelphia will mandate indoor masking on April 18, the city’s health department announced Monday.
“The Philadelphia Department of Public Health established a benchmark system in February that uses case counts, hospitalizations, and the increase in case rates to determine which safety strategies are needed,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. “The seven day daily average of cases, 142 as of April 8, and a 60% increase in case counts over the past 10 days met the standards to reintroduce the indoor mask mandate.”
The announcement came as a new variant, BA.2, continues to sweep across the nation. The paper cited Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole as saying the number of cases have prompted the move.
“If we fail to act now, knowing that every previous wave of infections has been followed by a wave of hospitalizations and a wave of deaths, it’ll be too late for many of our residents,” she said, the paper reported. She said during a press conference that 750 city residents died during the Omicron wave over the winter.
“We don’t know if the BA.2 variant in Philadelphia will have the kind of impact on hospitalizations and deaths that we saw with the original omicron variant this winter,” Bettigole said. “I suspect that this wave will be smaller than the one we saw in January. This is our chance to get ahead of the pandemic, to put our masks on until we have more information on the severity of this variant.”
