Brookline To Ditch Outdoor Mask Mandate May 21

BROOKLINE, MA — Brookline garnered national attention this week when it became one of the few municipalities in the state to continue requiring people wear masks outdoors —despite the federal and state authorities saying it was no longer necessary.

Less than a week later, the Town's Advisory council on Public Health, made up of five individuals, including two doctors a nurse practitioner and other public health experts held an emergency meeting online to reconsider that Wednesday night. The virtual meeting was full, with some 100 people logged in to watch which way the group went.

By the end of the meeting they agreed they would lift the community’s outdoor mask mandate on May 21 and fall in line with the state mandate.

Brookline's outdoor mandate has remained in place even after Gov. Charlie Baker ended the state’s last week.

Factors in Brookline’s decision included the low risk of outdoor transmission and also to bolster neighbors’ mental health.

"We are emerging from a real crisis, and it's both a mental health crisis and a COVID crisis," said Dr. Natalia Linos, who said the mental health benefits of being permitted to take off the masks outdoors when distanced from groups outweighed any slight risk of keeping it on.

"The mental health impact of lifting a mask mandate outdoors would have little physical impact but hopefully would be good for our community's mental health," she said. "We want to follow the science and we want to follow it in a way that we're not allowing ourselves to be afraid."

Watch part of the emergency meeting here:

• Previously: Brookline Outdoor Mask Mandate Still In Place

On April 27, the Center For Disease Control and Prevention issued guidance for vaccinated and unvaccinated people. The CDC said outdoor walking, running or biking outside was safe unmasked for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

In April 2020, the town was among the first in the state to order masks be worn in public, weeks before Gov. Charlie Baker issued a similar order. He revised the order in November to include outdoor spaces. Friday, Baker lifted the outdoor mask mandate in Massachusetts, citing improving public health metrics in Massachusetts and the low risk of contracting the virus outside when not in crowds.

Baker made his announcement at the same time President Joe Biden made one of his own that included relaxing federal mask-wearing guidelines.

Just a week earlier a prominent local infections diseases doctor said it was not necessary to continue to mask up outdoors.

"Transmissions do not take place between solitary individuals going for a walk, transiently passing each other on the street, a hiking trail, or a jogging track. That biker who whizzes by without a mask poses no danger to us, at least from a respiratory virus perspective," Dr. Paul Sax, clinical director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women's Hospital, wrote in a blog post for the New England Journal of Medicine April. 19.