A New York City Subway employee in Manhattan. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday that face masks will no longer be required on mass public transit.
The big picture: New York will now resemble other mass transit systems across the country, which changed their own COVID-19 face mask rules after a federal judge overturned the nationwide mask mandate for transportation, the New York Times reports.
Driving the news: Hochul announced the decision Wednesday, saying masks will be "optional in some places where they had previously been required."
- This includes the New York subway system and homeless shelters, per the New York Times.
- "Masks are encouraged, but optional," reads a post shared by Hochul. "Let's respect each other's choices."
- Masks will still be required at "state-regulated health care facilities" and in clinical settings, including hospitals and nursing homes, Hochul said.
State of play: New York's COVID-19 infections have been dropping and remain stable, Bloomberg reports.
- “We haven’t seen any spikes, and also people are getting back to work, back to school,” the governor said, according to Bloomberg.
- “We are seeing major declines in hospitalizations,” Hochul said, per NYT. “We have to restore some normalcy to our lives.”
Flashback: Hochul had been expected to change the COVID requirements for months now, NBC New York reports.
- The governor said in mid-April that the mask requirements wouldn't last too much longer. A surge of omicron variant cases kept the requirement in place, Axios previously reported.