GREENSBORO, N.C. — Guilford County's COVID-19 numbers have dropped over the last few days and some say that's enough to get rid of masks.
However, the county is still red on the CDC's map of community spread. Guilford County's Board of Commission chair wants to see more metrics improve before making a change.
The percent of positive cases has been a magic number throughout the pandemic for which local leaders and health experts to judge the community spread.
Guilford County's average percent positive rate has been around four point five percent for the last two weeks.
This is important because when the county put that mask mandate in place, it said it wanted the number at five percent or less for three weeks before considering a change.
Guilford County Commissioner Justin Conrad, who didn't vote for the mandate, thinks that time is coming.
"I would hope we would do it at our next meeting or the following meeting at the latest to reexamine this policy because we're at the exact metrics that the board voted on back in August," Conrad said.
Commission Chair Skip Alston said it's more complicated than that. Another factor is the vaccination rate. The board agreed that its goal was to see 70 percent of the eligible population fully vaccinated before relaxing mask rules but it's only at 62 percent right now.
"Our whole goal is to get as many people vaccinated as possible," Alston said. "That's the ultimate goal, not just testing and not the mask mandate. We want people to get vaccinated and then those percentages will go down."
The CDC still considers the transmission risk to be high in Guilford County because of the rate of new cases per one hundred thousand people. It's in the red, which is the highest level.
That means that the CDC still recommends people in Guilford County wear masks in public indoor settings but Conrad believes metrics will go down soon and he wants the commission to start talking about the next steps.
"There's got to be a light at the end of the tunnel," Conrad said. "There's got to be a point where we say we've gotta get back to normalcy."
Chairman Alston said he does not expect to take action at the next board meeting but does plan to talk to the county's mayors, law enforcement leaders and health officials about it in the next two weeks.