MINNESOTA, USA — Today St. Paul officially dropped its city-wide mask mandate, and yesterday Minneapolis did the same.
It's now been three weeks since the CDC decided those who are vaccinated don't need to mask up, and we wondered how that would impact COVID cases and vaccinations.
The data holds positive news on multiple fronts, but officials at the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) need a few more weeks of data to definitively say whether we are out of the woods.
Let’s start with what we do know.
Since May 14 (the day after the mask mandate lifted), the 7-day rolling average of new cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. dropped almost 50%, according to the CDC.
There’s been a 94% drop in average new cases since Jan. 8 when the U.S. had a quarter million new cases per day, as reported by the New York Times.
The mask decision may have also had another unintended effect.
The day the CDC made the announcement, CNN reported a spike in traffic to the vaccine info website vaccines.gov.
Since that week, vaccinations have leveled off from a month-long decline.
“I think the mask guidance, I think the lifting of the executive orders, I think the weather, I think all of those things have really brought us to a lighter place,” said Kris Ehresmann, state infectious disease director with MDH.
That said, MDH officials say they need a few more weeks of data to know, officially, if life will move passed the pandemic.