School Mask Requirement To End For Kids Younger Than 5: Mayor

NEW YORK, NY — The requirement to wear a mask at school and daycare for the city's youngest kids will end on April 4, according to Mayor Eric Adams.

The mayor said Tuesday that masks will become optional for children ages 2 to 4 years old the first Monday in April should coronavirus cases remain low. Children under 2 years old were not part of the city's school mask mandate.

"New York City is currently in a low-risk environment," the mayor said. “Each day, we review the data, and if we continue to see low levels of risk, then, on Monday, April 4, we will make masks optional for 2-4 year old children in schools and daycare settings."

The announcement comes two weeks after the rest of the city's public school children — ages kindergarten through 12th grade — were allowed to remove their masks.

Young children were still under a mask mandate given high hospitalization rates among children under 5 years old, who are not eligible to be vaccinated, Adams said at the time.

Like older grades, children ages 2 through 4 will still be able to wear a mask if they wish.

"Let's be respectful of whatever choice families make," Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan said.

Adams said Tuesday the city's health officials wanted to wait to lift the mask mandate for the youngest children while monitoring the impact of removing the mask requirement for older grades. The city and school coronavirus rates have remain low, he noted.

"After removing the mask for our K through 12 [students] we wanted to have two incubation periods to make sure we are not seeing a serious problem," Adams said.

New York City's seven-day average positivity rate stood at 1.66 percent on Tuesday, data shows.

A "subvariant" known as BA.2 — a sublineage of omicron that shows signs of even higher transmissibility — accounted for roughly a third of the city's cases this week.

Health officials said Tuesday they are monitoring the spread of the subvariant.

"With BA.2, we're not seeing any signs that it causes more severe illness in any age group," Vasan said Tuesday. "Right now, overall risk remains low, overall case in children remain low [and] hospitalizations in children remain low, which is giving us comfort to make this decision at this point."

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