Governor Cooper,

As NC physicians across all specialties, we are desperately and urgently seeking your leadership to mandate a universal masking policy for the start of the upcoming school year, which unfortunately happens to coincide with the current pandemic surge. As you know, our entire state is now “red” with alarming and escalating rates of Delta variant viral transmission. The StrongSchoolsNC Toolkit was developed to keep our kids safely in school. This Toolkit aligns with the recommendations provided by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Family Practice (AAFP) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and strongly advises that all individuals should be fully masked in schools.

We agree that vaccination is our strongest layer of protection. As Covid resurges in 2021 now with an even more infectious variant, we particularly need to protect those who remain ineligible for vaccination, including all children under the age of 12. Our COVID positivity rates are currently close to the same level as they were at the height of the pandemic in January 2021, and children are making up  to 18% of all positive cases. Nearly 2% of children infected with Delta variant are subsequently requiring hospitalization. As tired as we all are, we know we cannot afford to ease precautions at this time but rather we must come together to employ all available layers of protection to keep each other and the most vulnerable in our communities, safe.

Virtual learning took a toll on educators, children, and parents, and experts agree that every effort should be made to return kids to the classroom and to do so using a layered mitigation strategy, which includes vaccination of all who are eligible, and universal masking. Over the past few weeks, we have seen “mask optional” approaches fail time and time again. Inconsistent and partial masking is leading to school clusters of infections and as a result, widespread need to quarantine large groups of staff and students. In nearly all these schools, this predictable outcome has resulted in a rapid reversal of masking policy toward more universal requirements. We are optimistic that these schools will now fare much better, and we wish them a healthy and rewarding academic year.

Despite this clear precedent and against all current public health recommendation, as of August 19th, 37 of 115 total NC school districts continue to allow masks to be optional.  Despite many weeks of corresponding with school board members in collaboration with the local health department, these 37 school systems, the staff and students who attend, and their corresponding communities have been left at dire risk, and in most cases, without a reasonable alternative for schooling, by Board of Educations that have voted to maintain optional masking in response to fragments of the community who have aggressively but successfully influenced them away from public health and safety considerations.

While we understand your rationale for empowering local leaders to make good decisions autonomously, this simply has not happened for 37 of our counties. For this reason, we humbly and desperately request that you, Governor Cooper, come to the aid of our communities once again by issuing an executive order for a statewide mask mandate or statewide mask mandate for schools, so that we can keep our children in the best environment for learning while keeping them safe and protecting our communities as we forge on in battle with this virus.

Thank you for all that you have done for the State of NC during this most challenging pandemic.

With deep respect and gratitude,

North Carolina Physicians for Masks