St. Louis County drops mask mandate with COVID cases waning

With COVID-19 hospitalizations and new cases dropping in Missouri, the state's largest county will end its mask mandate next week, the county's top elected official said Wednesday.

The mask requirement in St. Louis County, which is home to around 1 million people, will end at 8 a.m. on Monday, County Executive Sam Page said.

In January, at the peak of the latest COVID-19 surge fueled by the omicron variant, Missouri was getting an average of nearly 12,000 new daily cases and had about 3,700 people hospitalized with the disease per day. The average has dropped below 800 new daily cases and to 1,638 hospitalizations.

In St. Louis County, the daily number of new cases dropped from 2,700 in early January to 130 as of Wednesday.

"With the mask mandate, a continued effort to get more people vaccinated and the virus weakening, we're in a much better place today -- a place where we are cautiously optimistic, a place where we can move from a mask requirement to a mask recommendation," Page said at a news conference.

The City of St. Louis will still require masks in public places. Mayor Tishaura Jones is deferring to the city health department on determining when it is appropriate to ask aldermen to drop the mandate, spokesman Nick Dunne said.

Kansas City's mask mandate expired last Thursday. Daily hospitalizations in the Kansas City metropolitan area have dropped by two-thirds over the past month, down to 113, according to data compiled by the Mid-America Regional Council.

New daily Kansas City-area cases that peaked at nearly 6,500 in January now stand at 244. The MARC data includes hospitalizations and cases in adjoining Kansas counties as well as the Missouri side of the region.