Texas. Mississipi drop mask requirements

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas announced on Tuesday that he was abandoning the state’s face mask requirement imposed amid the coronavirus pandemic and will allow businesses to operate at full capacity, saying “it is now time to open Texas 100 percent.”

The wide-reaching announcement in Texas came as similar rules were being lifted elsewhere: Restaurants, schools, movie theaters and bars are reopening and shedding restrictions in some of the nation’s biggest cities and most populous states, prompting more Americans to emerge after months of isolation and bringing the country closer to a semblance of life before the coronavirus pandemic.

In Chicago, tens of thousands of children returned to public school this week, while snow-covered parks and playgrounds around the city that have been shuttered since last March were opened.

Mississippi ended its mask mandate, too. Restaurants in Massachusetts were allowed to operate without capacity limits, and South Carolina erased its limits on large gatherings.

The reopenings were seen as both an official encouragement of a return to public life and also a reflection of the hope that the country is starting to feel as vaccines roll out and virus cases drop.

But many Americans are left in a quandary: wondering whether to follow the lure of optimism, as governors and mayors in California, Michigan and North Carolina endorsed widespread reopenings of businesses and schools, or to heed their own lingering concerns about the virus and the warnings of federal health officials who have said it is premature to lift too many restrictions....

Government officials have sent mixed, often cautious messages to the public. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser for Covid-19, said this week that for small groups of people who have all been fully vaccinated, there was low risk in gathering together at home. Activities beyond that, he said, would depend on data, modeling and “good clinical common sense,” adding that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would soon have guidance for what vaccinated people could do safely.

he director of the C.D.C., Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said during the same briefing on Monday that she was “really worried” about the rollbacks of restrictions in some states. She cautioned that with a decline in cases stalling and with variants spreading in cities like New York, “we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained.” ...