St. Louis backs off mask mandate for city workers

ST. LOUIS — City Hall ended a renewed mask mandate for city workers Friday afternoon under pressure from Jefferson City.

City spokesman Nick Dunne said in a press release that the health department now just “strongly recommends” employees mask up indoors, citing a recent rise in reports of respiratory illnesses in the region.

Dunne did not say exactly why the change was made. But Gov. Mike Parson’s office promptly claimed credit.

Parson consistently opposed mask mandates throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. And a spokesman for Parson, Jonathan Shifflett, noted his boss had reiterated that opposition on conservative talk radio as recently as Wednesday.

“A call was made,” Shifflett said. “He kept his promise. And now St. Louis is reversing course on that.”

The back-and-forth marked a brief revival of a familiar fight over public health policy between liberal St. Louis Democrats and conservative Capitol Republicans. The two sides spent years challenging one another over mask mandates and business closures in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a number of GOP officials immediately tweeted their disdain after they heard the latest news.

The change in policy also followed confusion about the data the health department cited in its decision and a lukewarm reception from some city employees.

The brouhaha began Thursday afternoon, when the city health department told city employees they would have to wear masks indoors starting Friday, and put out a press release urging the public to follow suit.

The health department justified both moves with a series of alarming statistics. It said that hospitalizations for COVID-19 in the region jumped 38% in December, that RSV cases in the BJC HealthCare system were well above benchmarks set in previous years, and that flu infections were on a similar trajectory.

“With activity of winter viruses rising at such a rapid pace, we must take action to slow transmission and prevent strain on our hospital systems,” Dr. Mati Hlatschwayo Davis, the health director, said in the press release.

But just days before, when area hospital officials had noted an increase in flu and COVID cases, they didn’t sound any alarms.

SSM Health’s Dr. Alex Garza, who led the region’s pandemic task force, had told the Post-Dispatch that while emergency departments and urgent cares were busy, they weren’t overwhelmed like they once were. COVID-19 patients were not as sick because of vaccination and previous exposure.

Publicly available data also showed that despite recent increases, COVID hospitalizations were nowhere near the peaks in previous years, and the flu season had so far been milder than in recent years.

The city’s push for universal masking also went above and beyond the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation for areas classified as “medium” risk for COVID-19 hospitalizations, as St. Louis and much of Missouri are now.

By Friday morning, the department was walking back its numbers on RSV and flu infections. And the employee mask mandate was drawing fire from talk radio.

“You knew it was coming … it’s a religion to these idiots,” KFTK (97.1 FM) host Mark Reardon wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

Marc Cox, another KFTK host, said in a video posted to X that Parson had just reiterated his opposition to mandates on his show Wednesday, and that he’d reached out to see if Parson would back that up.

Meanwhile, while many employees at City Hall strapped the masks back on, many visitors did not, raising questions about the effectiveness of the new policy.

Of the 10 people sitting outside the city assessor’s office around 3 p.m., for instance, just two people were wearing masks: an older woman and an assessor’s office employee.

Around that same time, word came down from the mayor’s office that the mandate was being rescinded. The governor’s office trumpeted its victory.

And by the end of the day, there was no one left to debate much of anything except the cleaning crew.

One cleaner walked between rooms with a light blue surgical mask firmly in place. But another was installing new trash bags with nothing covering his smile.

“Nobody wants to be smelling what they ate for breakfast,” he said.

Another cleaner, for his part, straddled the line. He wore his mask like a chinstrap as he finished cleaning a bathroom.

“I pulled it down,” he said with a sheepish grin. “I don’t know.”

See previous coverage here.