Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger renewed a mask mandate for the county on Tuesday, extending the requirement through Nov. 22.
The mandate, initially implemented in July, was already extended once by 45 days, and its second expiration date would have been this Thursday.
“You can see where we were when we first implemented the mask mandate, and you can see now where we flattened it,” Coppinger said at a news conference Tuesday, gesturing at a graph of new cases for the past three months.
Representatives of local hospitals, tourism businesses and schools echoed the need for the mask mandate, highlighting a returning sense of normalcy and the declining number of cases since the mandate started in July.
“We’ve come a long way since March 13, and a lot of that had to do with the mask mandate,” Thom Benson, communications director of the Tennessee Aquarium, said of the seven months since the virus was detected in Hamilton County.