The White House has resisted pressure to loosen its guidance on face masks to prevent Covid-19, saying Americans should still wear them indoors and in schools.
In a daily press briefing on Wednesday, spokesperson Jen Psaki said people should continue following advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) despite a wave of Democratic states relaxing their rules.
“Our guidance has consistently been this: when you are in a high-transmission area, which is everywhere in the country, you should wear a mask in indoor settings, including schools,” Ms Psaki said.
“There are states that have rolled back their mask guidelines, that have given more flexibility to communities – they’re different, it’s not uniform, what every state has done – and certainly we continue to advise and recommend abiding by public health guidelines.”
It comes after Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and Oregon all said they would end mandatory masking in schools in the coming months, while New York state lifted its mask mandate for indoor businesses and California said it would end indoor masking for vaccinated people.
New Jersey governor Phil Murphy said the move was “a huge step back to normalcy for our kids”, citing a decline in Covid cases, a rise in vaccinations, and the apparent lower severity of the omicron variant.
On Monday, a group of both Democratic and Republican governors met with Mr Biden urging him to “move beyond the pandemic” and give states “clear guidelines on how we can return to a greater state of normality”.
Mr Biden, however, has not yet set out a national roadmap for the easing of Covid-19 guidance and restrictions, having previously seen his plan to “shut down” coronavirus kiboshed by omicron.
According to the CDC, new coronavirus cases in the US have declined sharply over the past month, from an average of 805,624 per day on 15 January to 247,319 per day on Monday.
However, daily deaths remain at their highest level since February 2021, with an average of 2,404 on Monday. Nearly 900,000 people have died of the virus, the CDC says.
