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Mask mandate to end in Boone March 7

A sign in a Boone restaurant asks customers to wear a mask. PAUL GARBER/WFDD FILE

Town Council members in Boone voted this week to lift a state of emergency that put COVID restrictions in place. The move means the town will end its mask mandate starting next month.

The decision comes amid declining case numbers and an appeal by Gov. Roy Cooper for schools and cities across the state to lift their masking requirements.

Watauga County Schools leaders recently changed their policy, going mask optional on Monday.

Rob Hudspeth is a senior vice president for Appalachian Regional Healthcare System. 

He says the number of COVID-related hospitalizations in the region has dropped by more than half since the start of February. 

Still, he says there are challenges that remain in the fight against the virus, including healthcare staffing shortages.

“We've had a lot of folks retire or change career direction or just leave healthcare altogether,” he says. “So that's our biggest concern right now. How do we keep our workforce engaged?”

The lifting of Boone's mask mandate goes into effect on March 7.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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