Louisiana has reinstated an indoor mask mandate, announced Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards on Monday.
The statewide mandate takes effect on Wednesday and is set to expire on Sept. 1, though Edwards said he could extend it and urged residents to start masking up immediately ahead of the order taking effect.
The mandate applies everyone in the state aged five and up, regardless of vaccination status, in all public places. “Yes, this does include school campuses,” Edwards stressed.
Edwards emphasized the importance of children wearing masks especially, noting that although the requirement starts only at five years old, the CDC and the Louisiana Department of Health do “strongly recommended that children age 2 to 4 also wear masks when they are indoors in public, as they can.”
“This is obviously not something I wanted to do,” said Edwards during a press conference. “But Louisiana is not in the place where we want it to be or need it to be.”
Louisiana currently has the fourth-highest daily average of coronavirus cases in the United States, behind California, Texas and Florida, amid a surge in cases nationwide that has been attributed to the Delta variant.