State College Borough Council votes to extend COVID masking ordinance. Here’s what to know
As Centre County continues its record-breaking surge of COVID cases, State College Borough Council voted unanimously Monday night to extend the borough’s mask ordinance until cases subside to a more manageable level.
The mask mandate, which requires both the vaccinated and unvaccinated to mask up indoors in businesses and borough buildings open to the public, was originally set to expire at the end of January. With Monday’s vote, the ordinance will now remain in place until county COVID transmission falls below “substantial” levels as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meaning fewer than 50 weekly COVID cases per 100,000 residents.
That would amount to about 81 weekly cases or fewer, a pace the county hasn’t experienced since early August. Over the most recent seven-day stretch, from Jan. 4-10, Centre County added 1,971 cases — more than 24 times higher than the rate needed to end the mandate.
According to Tom Charles, a Mount Nittany Health official who shared a public presentation Monday, there have already been more COVID cases in the first 10 days of January than there were in the entire month of January 2021.
“As we saw from the presentation by Mr. Charles, COVID is spreading everywhere — and this is really in the line of the very least we can do,” council President Jesse Barlow said.
To date, State College Borough is the Centre Region’s lone municipality to implement a mask mandate. However, Penn State also requires indoor masking and Patton Township will vote Jan. 19 on whether to enact an ordinance similar to the borough.
Borough businesses can technically be fined up to $300 per day for violating the local ordinance, while individuals can be fined $300 per infraction. But State College police Lt. Greg Brauser has consistently said the emphasis has been on “education, not citation.”
Much of the present concern remains with Mount Nittany Medical Center, the county’s lone hospital, as more COVID cases mean more of a strain on its services. Charles, executive vice president of system development and chief strategy officer, said hospital employees are “continuing to do everything we can” to run operations as normally as possible — but the hospital’s outlook is linked to a singular element.
“We’re really doing the best that we can,” Charles said. “But the underlying thing that will make our situation get better is to see some relief in the spread of COVID in the community — the ability to get patients out of the hospital, discharged into nursing homes and allow us to return to somewhat more normal operations.
“So the team is working very hard. But we are a long way from where we normally are and even a long way from where we were, in some respects, a year ago.”
According to the hospital dashboard, 47 COVID patients (35 unvaccinated) were hospitalized Monday. That’s still a decrease from the December average of 57 hospitalizations but is also a weekly high.
Since August, Charles said about 70% of their COVID patients have not been fully vaccinated. He encouraged vaccination (and boosters), social distancing and masking if the community wanted to get past the pandemic and the more transmissible omicron variant.
The most recent masking ordinance first went into effect in mid-September and has been extended three times — including a previous two-week extension to facilitate a meeting — although a stricter COVID-related ordinance was first passed in August 2020.
Council voted Monday on the extension after the State College Board of Health formally recommended it last week. There is no specific end date, outside of the CDC parameters, so it’s possible the latest extension lasts months.
