45 percent of New Yorkers say mask mandate should remain: poll

A poll from the Siena College Research Institute released on Tuesday found that a plurality of New Yorkers said the state’s mask mandate should stay in place. 

When asked about the state’s public indoor masking requirements, 45 percent of those surveyed said the mandate should remain in place, while 31 percent said they would have wanted it to end earlier than it did, the poll showed.

Twenty percent of respondents said they thought the mandate ended at the right time.

On the topic of masking requirements in schools, the survey found that 58 percent of New Yorkers polled wanted to wait for data in early March before deciding about lifting mask mandates. The survey also found that 30 percent of respondents said that the mask mandate for schools should have ended already, and 10 percent said they wanted the requirement to end following schools’ February break.

The Siena College survey included 803 voters registered in the state of New York. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points and was conducted from Feb. 14 to Feb. 17.

New York is one of many states, including California, Illinois and Massachusetts, to announce they were lifting indoor mask mandates in recent weeks.

Earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) announced that the state’s indoor mask mandate and vaccine requirements would be lifted. The governor said that masking requirements in schools, however, would remain.

Around the time of Hochul’s announcement, Rochelle Walensky, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned against states dropping mask mandates.

“At this time, we continue to recommend masking in areas of high-end substantial transmission. That’s much of the country right now in public indoor settings,” Walensky said.