“This is our chance to get ahead of the pandemic.” - Philadelphia Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole . The mask mandate begins on Monday, April 18 to give businesses a “one-week education period.” . . “I suspect that this wave will be smaller than the one we saw in January. But if we wait to find out and to put our masks back on, we’ll have lost our chance to stop the wave,” she said during Monday’s news conference, announcing the new mandate. “If we mask up now and find out that hospitalizations don’t increase in the U.S. in response to this variant the way they have in the U.K., then great. We can then take off our masks with a sense of relief. But if we fail to act now, knowing that every previous wave of infections has been followed by a wave of hospitalizations, and then a wave of deaths, it will be too late for many of our residents. This is our chance to get ahead of the pandemic.” -Philadelphia Inquirer #maskupphl (at Point Breeze) https://www.instagram.com/p/CcQP5IArwHs/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
