After two months of reinstating the mask mandate in the Town of Highlands to try and stop the spread of COVID-19, the Board of Commissioners unanimously voted to rescind the mandate.
Back when the board reinstated the mandate, the positivity rate of COVID-19 was up to 18 percent in Macon County.
“The good news is that it is going down,” Highlands’ mayor Patrick Taylor said. “I checked today [Thursday] and it was at 10.33 percent and is going down. The reason that I wanted to bring this up is because we have the Halloween event that will be coming and that is a big event.”
Highlands-Cashiers Hospital CEO Tom Neal said that he gathered his analysis from the Center for Disease Control.
“When I checked, our positivity rate was actually 10.56 percent, which is still above the recommended 10 percent that would be classified as below moderate,” Neal said. “With that being said, this is all of Macon County. The CDC does not break it down at the town level.”
Neal said he is noticing a decline at HCH in the treatment of patients.
“Looking at our region, the mountain area, during the peak we were at 256 patients per day with COVID,” Neal said. “We are down to about 150 per day for all of our area. When you look at it, you definitely see a trend down with the positive cases that are being reported and the positivity rate of the number of cases that are being tested that are being converted to positive and the number of hospitalizations.”
Back at the peak of COVID-19, Macon County was seeing about 30 positive cases per day, but Neal said when he checked last week, the county was only reporting one to two positive cases per day.
Highlands police chief Andrea Holland said the participation during the mask mandate has been low.
“I have received a lot of phone calls with concerns from residents that people on the street have not been wearing masks,” Holland said. “I, myself, have seen a very low percentage of people wearing masks on the sidewalks. The problem with us is that when we mandated the mask requirement, we didn’t put a fine or consequence to that so we couldn’t really enforce it. That has been our struggle. We don’t have anything to enforce.”
Commissioner John Dotson agreed with Chief Holland.
“In my travels around town, I have seen people walking without masks and even businesses not requiring it,” Dotson said. “The businesses have signs on the door that say, ‘Masks Recommended,’ which I think is counterintuitive to a mandate. It’s essentially unenforceable and we have a lot of people that are not wearing masks. I think if you need to wear a mask or feel uncomfortable being out in public without a mask then by all means wear a mask. At this point I am for removing the mandate and I don’t even know that masks recommended means anything.”
Commissioner Amy Patterson said since the numbers are getting lower, it becomes harder to enforce personal behavior.
“Anybody that wants to wear a mask or any business that wants to require mask wearing, can do that on their own,” Patterson said.
The board voted unanimously to remove the mask mandate in all business areas including the sidewalk and in the town facilities.
- By Christopher Smith