Pritzker plans to lift mask mandate by Feb. 28, except in ‘sensitive locations’

An updated story including the governor’s full announcement can be viewed here.

SPRINGFIELD – Gov. JB Pritzker will make an official announcement on the state’s plan for lifting its indoor mask mandate at 2 p.m. in Chicago, but in a morning news conference in Champaign Wednesday, he noted that he plans to lift the indoor mandate for some settings by Feb. 28.

That won’t be the lift date for schools and other “sensitive locations,” he said, declining to give a timeline as to when the mandate would be lifted in those places.

“Of course, we still have the sensitive locations of K-12 schools, where we have lots of people who are joined together in smaller spaces, thousands of people interacting in one location at a time. And so that’s something that will come weeks hence,” he said at an unrelated news conference at the University of Illinois.

Whether he has the authority to issue such mandates in schools, however, will be a question decided by state courts. The 4^th District Court of Appeals is currently considering whether a lower court’s temporary restraining order on the governor’s school mandates pertaining to about 170 school districts will remain in effect.

“People are tired of wearing masks,” Pritzker said, but the people of Illinois have positioned themselves better than other midwestern states because they’ve worn them, he added.

The mandates have been aimed at protecting vulnerable Illinoisans, he said.

“We have lots of people who are vulnerable, who are seniors, who are immunocompromised, and lots of people who don’t know that they’ve got an underlying condition, that when they’ve been hit with COVID-19 it devastates them,” he said. “And unfortunately, we’ve seen many, many people die.”

The reason Pritzker is planning on lifting the indoor mask mandate is because hospitalizations for COVID-19, which pushed heights of 7,400 in mid-January, have fallen by nearly two-thirds, to 2,634 as of Tuesday night.

Click here to view an updated story from the governor’s full announcement.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government and distributed to more than 400 newspapers statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

Jerry Nowicki

Jerry began his career in news in 2013 and has covered state government since 2019. He was the editor of the LeRoy Farmer City Press in McLean and DeWitt counties from 2013 until it closed in 2017. During that span, the Press was named the state’s best small weekly newspaper by the Illinois Press Association. He was born and raised in south suburban Evergreen Park and graduated from Illinois State University with a degree in journalism.