For the past two years, masks have become the norm, especially in school. Due to the rising of new variants, there have been many ups and downs when it comes to the rate of COVID cases. Though Omicron is still relatively new, fortunately, fewer people have been getting sick recently. Since March 2nd, the mandate for masks in New York State schools including Lindenhurst High School was lifted. This was the decision of New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who had stated that the reason for the lift of the mandate was the rapid decrease of COVID cases as of recent.

At the time of this writing, daily cases reported range from around 600-800 a day in New York, about 100 of which are in Suffolk County. This is a huge improvement from the daily cases during Omicron’s peak, which was about forty-thousand cases a day throughout the state. Due to this and the increasing number of people becoming vaccinated, about 89% of people in New York receiving at least one dose of a vaccine, masks no longer seemed necessary.

For the majority, students at Lindenhurst High School seemed to have a very positive reaction to this, as most people did not choose to wear a mask once this decision was made. However, a small number of people did still chose to do so. There are various reasons for this, including the possibility that someone they live with is at high risk. For this reason, it is important to be kind to those that still chose to wear their mask. If you are someone that is concerned, N95 masks are provided by the school which are known to work much better than cloth masks. Overall, this is a huge step in making our way back to normalcy and hopefully, the rate of daily cases will continue to decrease