The city of Columbus’ mask mandate will remain in place until at least the next city council meeting in two weeks.
Council members voted 3-2 to keep the mandate and other requirements, including for businesses to post signage reminding customers to wear masks and adhere to social distancing guidelines, at their regular meeting Tuesday. City Attorney Jeff Turnage said there are currently no local capacity restrictions on restaurants or other businesses.
The vote came the day Gov. Tate Reeves issued an executive order ending a statewide mask mandate and rolling back capacity restrictions for businesses as of 5 p.m. today, though K-12 schools still have restrictions. However, Reeves’ executive order says local governments can enact their own restrictions if they choose.
The council opted to keep Columbus’ restrictions to curb the COVID-19 pandemic in place after several minutes of sometimes confusing back-and-forth between council members over whether to vote to keep the city’s own mask ordinance in place, table the issue — which would have also kept the ordinance in place — or lift the ordinance altogether.
Vice Mayor Bill Gavin, who presided over the meeting for the absent Mayor Robert Smith, recommended the council wait before taking any action, since Reeves signed the order only a few hours before the council meeting started at 5 p.m.
However, Ward 1 Councilwoman Ethel Stewart pushed for doubling down on the mask mandate with a vote that night so as to avoid confusion among city residents.
“I’ve received phone calls from people already, saying ‘We don’t have to wear masks anymore,'” she said. “I just feel that if we table this, wait until later, you’re just going to cause more confusion. We do have the ability to say, ‘We will continue to mandate masks.’ I really feel we should make that decision tonight.”
She, Ward 2 Councilman Joseph Mickens and Ward 5 Councilman Stephen Jones all voted to keep the mandate in place, while Ward 3 Councilman Charlie Box and Ward 4 Councilman Pierre Beard voted against it.
Box spoke little during the council’s discussion, but told The Dispatch after the meeting that with case numbers decreasing and vaccinations increasing, he thinks the city should start getting “back to normal.”
“I’m going to probably still wear my mask for a while, but people have got a lot of fatigue with this,” he said. “… We’ve followed the governor’s (mandates that) have kind of gotten through this whole thing. They have the numbers and know what’s going on more than we do, so I felt like it was time to move on and try to get past this. I know there’s still some lingering disease out there, but my goodness.”
Beard said during the discussion that while he also would continue to wear his mask, he thinks it is best the city continue to follow Reeves’ example, though Turnage pointed out the city has, at times during the pandemic, had a mask mandate in place when Reeves did not.
“People either wear masks or they don’t wear masks, but the governor says no more masks,” Beard said. “… The small business owners that we want to help save, they’re still spending more money on the precautionary things, even though the numbers are down. Everything is down.”
Lowndes County has had 6,031 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 140 deaths since the pandemic began in March 2020, according to the most recent numbers on Mississippi State Department of Health’s website. The county is seeing an average of six new cases a day for the past seven days, a far cry from the dozens of new cases per week late last year. Gavin said he has talked to officials from Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle who told him cases are significantly down at the hospital as well.
However, Jones pointed out the numbers being down could be interpreted as a sign that the masks are working, adding that with the cold weather two weeks ago, people weren’t out and about spreading the virus anyway.
“Could that be why we don’t have that many people, because we’ve been wearing masks?” he said. “So we take the masks off, then it goes up. People die.”
He and Mickens both told The Dispatch they want the council to take up the issue at a future meeting. Mickens in particular said he wants the council to not make the decision “spur of the moment.”
Stewart, however, told The Dispatch she wants to keep the mask mandate in place until everyone has had a chance to be vaccinated. She said as a former nurse, she knows of many health care workers and first responders, including personal friends of hers, who have contracted the disease and some who have died from it.
“I think the mandate should stay in place, and I felt very strong about that,” she said. “Because when you look at the number of people, not globally, but just in Mississippi, that have lost their lives and have … an illness from this COVID, we need to continue to try to protect the citizen(s) until most of the citizen(s) in Mississippi get vaccinated. Then I would feel more comfortable if I could choose to wear the mask or I choose not to wear the mask.”
Outside the city limits, Lowndes County had no mask mandate in place separate from the governor’s, meaning mask-wearing is no longer required in public outside the Columbus city limits. Supervisors president Trip Hairston told The Dispatch the board will likely discuss whether to implement a county-wide mask mandate at its next meeting on March 15.
Conflict disclosure: Managing Editor Zack Plair took part in editing this article. He is currently in legal proceedings that involve the city of Columbus. Details are available in previous reporting.
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