CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is expected to announce Wednesday that the state's indoor mask mandate will end for most public settings by Feb. 28.
According to the Governor's Office, masks won’t be required in grocery stores, restaurants, and other gathering points, but they’ll still be required in hospitals, on mass transit, and some other settings with vulnerable residents.
Pritzker spoke Tuesday at a Springfield grocery store and said his administration is working on new mask guidelines.
"We’ve gotten here because people wore their masks. We’ve gotten here because people got vaccinated. We have the highest vaccination rate in the Midwest. We’ve gotten here because people have been responsible in Illinois, and so it’s a tremendous desire of mine to do what we did last summer which is, you know, take masks off," Pritzker said.
Pritzker intends to keep the mask mandate in place in public schools — pending the result of a legal challenge in downstate Sangamon County — but he said he expects to lift that requirement “weeks hence,” Pritzker said at an unrelated Champaign news conference.
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“We still have the sensitive locations of K-12 schools, where we have lots of people who are, you know, joined together in smaller spaces, thousands of people interacting in one location at a time, and so that’s something that will come weeks hence,” Pritzker said. “But very importantly, things are getting better across the State of Illinois, and that’s really a credit to leaders across the state, but really to the people of Illinois.”
On Tuesday at an unrelated Springfield news conference, Pritzker said, “we’ve got to be very careful about how we remove those mask mandates, and also making sure that the schools are doing what’s responsible — [that] they have the testing available going forward, that they know when they should be thinking about — at the local level — when they should be putting masks back on when there are outbreaks and so on."
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Illinois is currently one of nine states that has a universal mask mandate.
Latest data shows Illinois is averaging 6,800 new COVID cases and 76 deaths a day. The death rate is down more than 40 percent since the middle of last month.
The governor also pointed to a decline in COVID-19 hospitalizations in recent weeks, which peaked at nearly 7,400 in mid-January and have declined to about 2,600.
Pritzker is expected to release more details about phasing out his mask mandate at a Loop news conference scheduled for 2 p.m. You can listen live to his new conference on WBBM Newsradio.
His move to drop masks follows several other Democratic-led states, including California, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, and Oregon, that have announced plans this week to let mandates expire. Additionally, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced plans Wednesday to phase out that state’s mandate while keeping masks on in schools.
They join the ranks of many Republican-led states that for months have been bucking mask guidelines set last summer by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That agency still recommends masks in public indoor settings in areas where COVID-19 case counts are considered “high” or “substantial” — labels that still apply to more than 99 percent of counties nationwide, and all of Illinois.
But with experts placing more emphasis on COVID-19 hospitalizations than on case numbers after the Omicron surge, officials feel “much more comfortable” about easing restrictions, Pritzker said.
“I would remind people that it’s downstate and southern Illinois and central Illinois where we’ve had the highest numbers of people, percentage wise, filling ICU beds and hospital beds,” the governor said Tuesday afternoon. “And now that those numbers are coming down...I think everybody, the doctors in particular, are feeling much more comfortable about alleviating the mitigations.”
(WBBM Newsradio and the Sun-Times Media Wire contributed to this report.)