Source: Megan Varner / Getty
Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has officially lifted the public indoor mask mandate for “The Big A.” Bottoms, who also fell ill with COVID-19 last year, said that while the city-wide mandate has been lifted, people will still be required to follow mask-wearing protocols “in all city facilities,” according to her most recent Twitter post.
The steadfast Mayor issued an executive order back in July, mandating that residents wear masks at all indoor public spaces including restaurants, grocery stores, and even salons. Vaccinated people were also required to follow suit. During that time, the highly transmissible Delta variant strain began to surge. Now, Atlanta has been officially placed in the “green zone” for COVID-19 because of the city’s massive decline in cases.
In August, Bottoms worked alongside public health officials to implement the COVID-19 Resilience Plan that placed the city under a color-coded system to track the pandemic’s status — from worst to best– by referring to red, yellow, green and blue zones, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted.
“The COVID-19 Resilience Plan offers needed flexibility to address [the pandemic] with the unpredictability of the COVID-19 variants while underscoring the importance of dynamic guidance versus a static approach,” the mayor’s office said in a statement at the time.
A-Town residents can go maskless because now, according to the city’s reopening guidelines, there have been 25-75 cases being reported on average over a 10-day time period, and hospitalizations have also seen a dramatic decline, averaging between 50-200. The news is astounding given that the city was experiencing a high-up tick in COVID cases back in August. At the time, the mayor had announced that the city was in a yellow zone with new cases averaging between 75-249 and hospitalizations surging between 201-349, a separate article from the AJC reported.
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