Last week, Governor Phil Murphy announced that mask mandates for New Jersey’s schools and child care settings will end on March 7. The governor noted the small number of student COVID cases linked directly to in-school transmission (2,650 out of 1.4 million students), and the continued decline in cases and hospitalizations after the omicron surge.The governor also made an important point. “We are not going to manage COVID to zero,” he said. “We have to learn how to live with COVID as we move from a pandemic to an endemic phase of this virus.”It appears that is the step we are approaching in this pandemic. Learning to live with COVID, and crafting a new normal. It is worth noting, too, that vaccine approval for children younger than five may be just weeks away.So what does normalcy mean in a post-COVID world? We have discovered much of what it would look like, in bits and pieces, stops and starts, after all adults had access to vaccines. But once the school mask mandate ends next month, we will get an even greater sense of what “normal” looks like, as nearly all restrictions will have been removed.Surely, “normal” will be different for every person and every family, just as it was before the pandemic. And, as the past year has shown, a new variant or surge may mean we will need to return to masking for periods of time in the future. That’s just a reality of life now.Individual school districts will still have to approve an end to mask wearing, and Livingston Public Schools superintendent Matthew Block said the district will be “mask optional” for students and staff starting on March 7. If and when masks do start to come off in town, many will certainly feel like a crucial and long-awaited step toward normal life has been taken. Two years into this pandemic, we’re certainly anxiously awaiting such progress.
