Reports: Pritzker to announce mask mandate off-ramp plan Wednesday

Gov. JB Pritzker plans to reveal a phased off-ramp for his statewide mask mandate on Wednesday, according to multiple media reports.

Pritzker is scheduled for a 2 p.m. news conference to discuss the plan.

NBC 5 Chicago reported, citing sources with knowledge of the Wednesday announcement, that Pritzker will announce a phased-in plan to drop the indoor mask mandate “in most settings, but that plan will not include a repeal of the mask mandate in public schools.”

The plan is to have the mandate off before March 1, NBC reported.

As for schools, NBC reported “Pritzker is hoping to give schools more time before removing their mask mandates.”

Pritzker said at an unrelated news conference on Tuesday that Illinois residents should stay tuned for an announcement on the state’s indoor mask mandate, although he declined to say specifically what changes might be coming.

“I think I’ve said over the last few press conferences that I really believe that we ought to be looking seriously at how to ratchet that back,” Pritzker said of his mask mandates. “I think we’re going to be making announcements very soon about that.”

When pressed for what metrics the state is watching, Pritzker pointed to hospitalizations, although he did not say what thresholds would need to be met for changes to be triggered to lift the mask mandate.

“I would remind people that it’s downstate in southern Illinois and central Illinois where we’ve had the highest numbers of people, percentage-wise, filling ICU beds and hospital beds,” he said during a news conference at a grocery store in Springfield. “And now that the numbers are coming down, I think everybody, the doctors in particular, feel much more comfortable about alleviating mitigations.”

As of Monday night, hospitalizations had dropped drastically across the state from a recent January peak driven by the omicron variant of the coronavirus. The 2,634 hospital beds in use by COVID-19 patients statewide as of Monday night were down from the more than 7,300 in use on a single day in January.

Pritzker faced increasing pressures to issue new mask guidance in recent weeks as other Democratic-led states such as California and New Jersey announced plans to roll back mask mandates. A ruling from a Sangamon County judge also has thrown Pritzker’s authority to issue school mask mandates into question.

Beginning in August 2021, Pritzker issued a series of executive orders related to the reopening of public schools. They included a requirement that schools enforce a mask mandate for all students, staff and visitors; that they require all school personnel either be vaccinated or submit to weekly testing; and that they exclude from school premises for specified periods of time any student or staff member who tests positive for COVID-19 or who has been in close contact with someone who has.

On Friday, Sangamon County Judge Raylene Grischow issued a temporary restraining order invalidating the mask mandate for public schools. The ruling applied to about 170 school districts that were sued by parents and students.

Grischow ruled the mitigations amounted to a kind of “quarantine” and the Pritzker administration overstepped its bounds by issuing those mandates through emergency rules.

On Monday, Pritzker slammed Grischow’s decision for cultivating “chaos” for parents and families in the state, and he noted that Attorney General Kwame Raoul has appealed to have the ruling overturned.