At the April Board Meeting, Karma’s Board of Directors voted unanimously to extend the mandatory in-store masking policy until further notice. How did the Board arrive at this decision? Three key pieces of information guided the final decision:
- Member Voting: One hundred and thirty-eight (n=138) members responded to the Board’s survey with 76% voting “Yes” to keep the mask mandate in place beyond April 27th.
- Staff Voting: Nine (n=9) staff members took the Board’s survey and 78% voted “Yes” to extend the mask mandate beyond April 27th.
- Covid trends as of April 24th: key indicators, like covid wastewater signals and weekly change in hospital & ICU occupancy due to covid, had either increased or appeared to plateau, but had not yet started to decrease.1 The wastewater signal indicates continued high circulation of the virus, while the hospital and ICU occupancy increases indicate a not-inconsequential severity as a result of infection. This is supported by Dr. Kieran Moore’s (Chief Medical Officer of Ontario) extension of the mandatory mask policy for select congregate settings in Ontario until June 11th.
The Board will re-evaluate the extension of the mandatory masking policy at the June 22nd Board meeting while also taking into consideration the results of the other two survey questions:
- 64% of members voted “No” to the question “Should Karma encourage masking but not make it mandatory?” and
- 58% voted “Yes” to the question “Should Karma bring back vulnerable hours once masking is no longer mandatory.”
- Note: Staff had similar voting trends.
If members have questions or comments about the Board’s decision to extend the masking policy or about the survey results please reach out to Board@karmacoop.org .
1 Sourced from the Ontario Covid Advisory, Science Table; https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/ontario-dashboard/; accessed April 24 2022