Ordinances in State College and Patton Township requiring indoor masking in places open to the public are no longer in effect, according to an announcements from the municipalities on Friday.
State College’s ordinance had been in effect in some form since September and Patton Township’s was enacted in January. According to both announcements, the requirements ceased when Centre County moved into the medium COVID-19 community level, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control in new guidance introduced last week.
Following the same guidelines, Penn State on Friday dropped mask requirements for many indoor settings on campus.
State College Area School District still plans to lift its masking requirement no earlier than March 28, as previously discussed by the board and administrators, Superintendent Bob O’Donnell wrote in a message to families on Tuesday.
“In order for our district to shift to optional masking, we must first develop plans for our documented high-risk individuals in a setting with reduced masking,” O’Donnell wrote. “For that to happen properly, we need sufficient time.”
The board and members of the district’s health and safety team will further discuss the plan during a work session at 7 p.m. on March 17 at the Patton Township Municipal building. The meeting will be broadcast live on C-NET and will be accessible via Zoom.
The CDC introduced last week new metrics for determining mitigation guidelines that measure not only new cases, but also new hospitalizations and local hospital capacity. At the low and medium community levels there is no recommendation for indoor masking except for those at high risk for severe illness.
A CDC order still requires masks to be worn on public transportation.
After reaching pandemic highs in December and early January new cases and hospitalizations have dropped precipitously in Centre County and across Pennsylvania, hitting their lowest levels since early August.
Mount Nittany Medical Center had eight COVID-19 inpatients on Friday. The hospital had an average daily census of 57 COVID-19 inpatients in December and 45 in January.
The county’s seven-day average for new cases as of Thursday was 22 — down from 120 a month earlier and 244 six weeks ago.
Centre County had been at the high level for the first week of the new levels before dropping down to medium in a CDC update on Thursday.
“This classification… results in the Temporary Emergency Masking Ordinance no longer being in effect…” the borough and township said in nearly identical announcements.
Both ordinances, however, stated that they “shall remain in effect until the COVID transmission rate in Centre County drops below the ‘substantial’ spread threshold as defined by the CDC, meaning fewer than 50 weekly cases per 100,000 residents are being registered in Centre County.”
The CDC continues to publish daily transmission levels — separate from the new community levels — that track new cases and testing positivity rates. Under those measures, Centre County remains at the substantial transmission level with 99.15 cases per 100,000 residents over the last seven days, according to the CDC.
“Our interpretation of the language in the ordinance was that this was based on the CDC’s recommendation at the time and those recommendations recently changed,” Douglas Shontz, assistant to the borough manager, wrote in an email. “The ordinance was based off the ‘high-substantial-moderate-low’ model by the CDC that was in place at the time. Based off the recent CDC guidance to change to the ‘high-medium-low’ model, we interpreted the shift from high to medium to mean that the ordinance was no longer in effect.”
Patton Township officials also felt the introduction of the new guidance met the intent of the ordinance.
“In the spirit of following CDC guidance it is the consensus of the Board of Supervisors that the move to Medium under the newest guidance satisfies the criteria contained in the ordinance to end the masking requirement,” Patton Township Manager Doug Erickson wrote in an email. “Under the new CDC guidance masks were recommended when indoors in public when we were in the High category while that recommendation is not in effect under the Medium rating.”
State College police have not issued any citations since the ordinance was originally enacted in September and have instead focused on education, a department spokesperson previously said.
Borough Manager Tom Fountaine said in December that the ordinance “has been virtually unenforceable.”
Patton Township Police Chief Tyler Jolley said the department has emphasized education in responding to complaints about mask ordinance violations.
