BATON ROUGE, La. — Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said that while the state's public health emergency surrounding COVID will remain for the time being, almost all of the restrictions concerning crowd sizes and mask wearing are being removed.
“Thanks to the wide availability of vaccines and the 1.4 million Louisianans who already have gone sleeves up and after hitting a new low in hospitalizations, the order I have signed today contains the fewest state-mandated restrictions ever," said Edwards.
Schools will be required to keep mask mandates in place until the current semester is over, but can make their own determination about masks starting with any summer school sessions or programs.
Mask mandates will remain on public transportation, he said, which is a federal requirement. And mask mandates will continue at health care facilities, jails and prisons.
Edwards emphasized again that local governments and private property owners can set their own requirements and he asked people to respect their guidelines.
"COVID is not over," he said. "We don't yet have the percentage of people vaccinated in Louisiana to have that confidence."
Edwards tweeted Tuesday that the number of hospitalizations currently reported - 269 as of Tuesday - is the lowest since the pandemic began.
"These vaccines are keeping people out of the hospital and saving lives," he said in the Tweet.
Edwards lifted the statewide mask mandate four weeks ago with the exception of a handful of locations, including K-12 schools, colleges and universities, public transportation, government buildings and health care facilities.
The order calling for masks in state buildings was taken down 11 days ago.
Edwards doesn't have a lot of extra room to move on without taking Louisiana back to where it was prior to the pandemic.
There were 13 deaths reported due to COVID Monday, a stark reminder that the virus is still lethal though it seems that its spread has been severely stunted, especially since the onset of vaccines.
"The deaths are harder to understand and accept now, months after the vaccines were available," he said. "We've had over 10,500 deaths and 99.9 percent of those were from people who weren't vaccinated."
Louisiana is a laggard nationally with vaccinations with approximately 35 percent of the state's residents having at least one shot. Very few states have a lower rate.
New Orleans, conversely, has a high level of people who have been vaccinated, though it continues to have more restrictive guidelines than the rest of the state.