Maine may drop school mask recommendation after February break

By Lia Russell, Bangor Daily News Staff

State health officials will revisit their recommendation that students wear masks in school after next week’s February break, as a handful of school departments reconsider their mask requirements. 

“The bullet train that is omicron is slowing down,” Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said Wednesday, citing high student vaccination rates and declining hospitalizations as factors. 

Shah stopped short of saying that state health officials plan to drop their recommendation that students wear masks at school, noting that he wanted to see more stability in favorable virus trends and see if there is an uptick in COVID cases following the return from next week’s vacation. 

The news comes as schools consider rescinding mandatory masking policies in light of waning hospitalizations and nearby states like Massachusetts and Connecticut rolling back their statewide mandatory mask policies. The Maine CDC currently recommends masking in schools in accordance with the federal CDC. 

Regional School Unit 22 in the Hampden area will decide in March on a school-by-school basis whether to roll back its mandatory masking policy, Superintendent Regan Nickels told the board of directors last week.

In addition, Maine will no longer require any schools to identify close contacts of people infected with COVID-19, a month after the Department of Education ended that requirement for schools that mandated mask wearing due to the omicron variant’s unrelenting spread. 

“We are uncoupling the mask requirement from contact tracing,” Shah said. “The omicron variant spreads so quickly that contact tracing loses its effectiveness regardless of masking.”