Nearly two years after Hoboken entered a state of emergency due to COVID-19, the City said the state of emergency is over.
Following the decline of confirmed positive COVID-19 cases, city officials said in a March 7 Nixle alert, the state of emergency is “no longer necessary.” The City of Hoboken first declared a state of emergency on March 12, 2020.
“After two long, hard years, we are finally at a time where it is no longer necessary to remain under a State of Emergency,” said Ravi Bhalla, Mayor of Hoboken, in the Nixle alert. “This is a credit to everyone who has chosen to get vaccinated and boosted, which has helped get us through the hard times of the past year. We will continue to be guided by science as the pandemic becomes an endemic, utilizing the tools we know will protect our residents.”
At Hoboken’s state of the city address held this week, Mayor Bhalla touched on how his last state of the city address was in January 2020, when “the world was a very different place.” “Social distancing, mask-up, and variant were not mainstays in my vocabulary, and I didn’t imagine that we would need to issue a State of Emergency because a deadly virus had arrived.”
In the past month, the Hoboken city government has been rolling back mask mandates and other COVID-19 protocols as cases of the virus dwindle. On February 9, Mayor Bhalla repealed mask requirements because Hudson County’s positivity rate fell below 5%. “The numbers make it clear that cases are significantly falling in the region,” Bhalla said. “This data point, combined with Hoboken’s high vaccination rate, robust testing options, and low hospitalizations, make it possible for us to lift our indoor mask requirement.”
Although the city has lifted mask mandates and the state of emergency, Stevens continues to require masks in indoor, public spaces. In a March 8 email to students, faculty, and staff, university administrators said that they are having conversations “to determine whether the masking policy should be revised in the coming weeks.”
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