Chicago Announces Indoor Mask Mandate For All, Regardless of Vaccination Status

The city of Chicago announced Tuesday an indoor mask mandate for all individuals 2 years and older, regardless of vaccination status, beginning Friday, Aug. 20.

“With the highly transmissible Delta variant causing case rates to increase, now is the time to re-institute this measure to prevent further spread and save lives,” said CDPH Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady in a statement. “We continue to track the data closely and are hopeful this will only be temporary and we can bend the COVID curve, as we’ve done in the past.”

According to Arwady, masks are required in all indoor public settings, “including bars and restaurants, gyms, common areas of condos and multi-residential buildings, and private clubs.”

“Similar to previous mask mandates, masks can be removed at restaurants, bars and other eating/drinking establishments by patrons when they are actively eating and drinking,” Arwady said in a statement. “Masks can also be removed for certain activities that require their removal, such as beard shaves or facials. Additionally, masks can be removed by employees in settings that are not open to the public, if employees are static and maintaining at least six feet from all other individuals (office cubicles, for example).”

The mandate announcement comes a day after Chicago surpassed the metric of 400 average new cases of COVID-19 diagnosed per day, a figure that city health officials warned earlier in the pandemic would mark a “line in the sand” to implement more mitigations.

Chicago was averaging 419 new COVID-19 cases per day as of Monday, according to city data. That metric was up from 347 the week before, having grown by 21% in the past week.

That figure is also more than 12 times the low of 34 that the city saw in late June, before cases began to rise again, but remains lower than the more than 700 new cases per day the city was seeing at the peak of the last surge earlier this year.

On July 19, Chicago’s average daily COVID case rate was at 132, meaning the number of average new cases per day has more than tripled in the past four weeks.

While cases continue to steadily rise, other metrics have not been increasing at the same rate, city data shows.

Hospitalizations in Chicago are down 18% from last week while deaths are down 24%, per the city’s data. But the positivity rate in testing is up to 4.3% this week, an increase from 3.8% last week, which was up each week since it was at 1% a month ago.

The average of 419 new cases per day recorded Monday is over the threshold of 400 that Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady said just over a year ago “really marks line in the sand” to bring back restrictions to slow the pandemic’s spread.

City officials cited that metric last year in announcing that Chicago Public Schools would begin the 2020-2021 school year with fully remote learning.

That figure of 400 cases per day is also the equivalent of the threshold Chicago officials use to determine if states should be added to the city’s travel advisory, recommending unvaccinated individuals entering the city from those areas test negative for COVID-19 or quarantine upon arrival.

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