By Delayna Earley
The Island News
Lockdowns and mask mandates will not be returning to South Carolina, despite recent surge in COVID-19 cases, according to Gov. Henry McMaster.
On Wednesday, Sept. 9, McMaster posted a video to the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, saying that the lockdowns imposed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic were a “mistake” and he vowed to block any mask mandates, school closures or government lockdowns in response to the rise in cases.
In the video he said that the previous mandates and lockdowns were made based off ofrecommendations from expert sources that were “in error” and they “caused damage.”
“We are not going to do a lot of the foolish things that were done in other states that we limited to a great degree here in S.C.,” said Gov. McMaster in the video.
He went further to say that a lot was learned during the pandemic and that common sense is very important and was abandoned in other parts of the country, but not here in S.C.
“We’ve got to do everything we can to see that our young people get the best education available,” Gov. McMaster said.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, numbers for COVID-19 hospital admissions in S.C. have surged from 56 on June 24 to 373 on Sept. 2, which is the most recently reported data.
Due to the recent rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations, some schools, hospitals and government buildings across the country have been implementing mask mandates.
City of Beaufort mayor Stephen Murray said that he has been communicating with Russell Baxley, president and CEO of Beaufort Memorial Hospital, and he said that while the hospital has seen an uptick in the number of cases that they have seen, but fortunately the cases that they are seeing are not that serious.
“They have only had a couple of folks go to the ICU and even those who are going to the ICU, they aren’t having to vent them,” Murray said.
Murray continued to say that during the pandemic, it was more about managing healthcare facilities and healthcare capacity, and that is currently not a worry.
“We haven’t discussed any kind of mask mandates or restrictions, but we will be actively talking to the hospital to kind of let them give us guidance with what the real time situation is looking like.
Candace Bruder, spokesperson for the Beaufort County School District said that they are required to follow federal and state laws, but she said that the “impact of the pandemic on learning loss demonstrated that in-person instruction is the most beneficial for students’ academic performance.”
She also said that during the pandemic, the infection rates in the schools were not higher than what was present in the community and in many cases they were lower.
Murray said that he thinks that this is something that we are just going to have to “learn to live with, but thankfully due to vaccines and natural immunity that is being built it does not seem like this spike is going to be as serious as it was last time.
Delayna Earley lives in Beaufort with her husband, two children and Jack Russell. She formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She joined The Island News in 2022. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
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