Mayor Eric Adams announced on Friday that New York City would seek to keep its school mask mandate in place for children under 5 and that the city would appeal an order by a judge on Staten Island that moved earlier in the day to strike it down.
Mr. Adams also said the city would ask for a stay so that the mask mandate could remain in effect. The mayor had earlier said that the mandate would be lifted starting on Monday if coronavirus cases did not rise.
Mr. Adams said that preschoolers should continue to wear masks because they are too young to be vaccinated and cases are increasing again in the city, a rise fueled by an Omicron subvariant, BA.2, that is now dominant in the United States.
“New Yorkers, we want you to be prepared, not panicked,” Mr. Adams said at a news conference at City Hall.
The city’s health commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, asked parents for “patience and grace” as the city tried to keep New Yorkers safe.
“We’re recommending to wait a little bit longer before making masks optional for this age group,” Dr. Vasan said at the news conference.
Mr. Adams had announced last week that he planned to stop requiring masks for children under 5 at child care centers and preschools starting this Monday. But cases have started to rise over the last month, from about 500 daily cases in early March to about 1,250 daily cases now. The city could soon move from a low risk level to a medium risk level, according to a new color-coded alert system based on guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Manhattan in particular is on the cusp.
“We expect to move to a higher risk category in a matter of weeks,” Dr. Vasan said.
Mr. Adams, a Democrat who took office in January, has focused on the city’s recovery from the pandemic and has rolled back some restrictions, including ending a proof-of-vaccination mandate for restaurants, gyms and entertainment venues, known as the Key to N.Y.C. program, and removing a mask mandate for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. He had faced pressure from some parents to end the mask mandate for preschool-aged children.
He introduced the alert system last month, and the city issued “recommended actions” for each risk level. According to the system, the city should consider reinstating the Key to N.Y.C. program, at the medium risk level. If the risk level becomes high or extremely high, the city could once again require masks indoors or urge residents to shelter in place.
Health experts worry that BA.2, which has fueled case surges in Europe and Asia, could lead to another wave of the pandemic in the city, and possibly the country. They believe that the true number of cases in New York might be higher than the data suggests, because many people are testing at home, with no official reporting of results.
Hospitalizations have remained low in New York City over the last month and are currently at about 13 per day, although hospitalizations are often a lagging indicator. There were about 1,000 hospitalizations a day in January, when cases last soared.
Mr. Adams also said Friday that the city planned to distribute about six million home tests this month. Asked if he would consider reinstating a mask mandate for older students, Mr. Adams said he would “pivot and shift” depending on the data and advice from his health team.
Dr. Vasan encouraged New Yorkers to get booster shots and to wear masks in public indoor settings, pointing out that he was wearing a mask at the news conference. He said that he wanted to use an “abundance of caution” for young children, who had higher hospitalization rates during the Omicron surge.
BA.2 — the most transmissible version of the coronavirus yet identified — accounts for more than half of new virus cases in the United States, the C.D.C. said this week. It accounts for about 70 percent of cases in the region that includes New York, New Jersey and Puerto Rico.
The mask mandate for children under 5 applies to the city’s 4-K and 3-K preschool classrooms, which serve about 95,000 students, and to all other preschool and child care centers. New York never required children under 2 to wear masks in day care centers.
Regardless of what happens in court, Mr. Adams encouraged parents to continue to have their children under 5 wear masks.
“You should keep your masks on your children,” he said.
The judge who ruled on the preschool mask mandate on Friday, Ralph Porzio of the State Supreme Court on Staten Island, wrote in his order that the mandate was “arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable.” Mr. Adams said he was confident that the city would prevail in its appeal and that he would let parents know what to expect on Monday.
“We truly believe this is within our powers to execute what’s best for New York,” he said.
Michael Chessa, a lawyer for the parents who challenged the mandate, said they wanted parents to have a choice and did not believe the city had provided clear benchmarks for removing the requirement.
“Merely saying that cases are on the rise and 2- to 4-year-olds can’t be vaccinated, that’s just unacceptable,” he said. “It was fine in the spring of 2020, but we’re well beyond that now.”
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