AJ Juarez is always excited about the dance classes at Barrio Dance, the urban dance studio he opened two years ago beside the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. But he was especially excited about Tuesday night’s hip-hop and contemporary dance classes.
There, for the first time in months, he and his fellow instructors would see their students' faces. “We've been really good about keeping the masks on, so we’re just excited to see people smiling and performing and dancing. We're super excited to see the expressions on their faces,” Juarez said. “I think it’s gonna bring some different energy to the room.”
In a May 2021 photo, AJ Juarez, founder of Barrio Dance, performs a freestyle dance at his studio, located at 401 N. Lake St. in Madison.
The Dane County mask mandate expired Tuesday, allowing dancers, diners and shoppers to forgo their masks for the first time in indoor spaces since August 2021. While customers at bars and restaurants have often been able to remove their masks as soon as they sit down at a table or have a drink in hand, customers at businesses like retail shops, grocery stores, hair salons and gyms have generally had to keep their masks on unless the establishment allowed only vaccinated individuals. Such mandates have been in place on and off since July 2020.
Many business owners and advocates celebrated the change. The Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce called it “welcome news.”
“For more than 600 days, our businesses dutifully followed and enforced public health orders,” a post on the Chamber’s website said. “As we recalibrate, we will continue to support our community’s health, but we must now turn our focus to the hard work of accelerating our economic recovery.”
But not all business owners are celebrating. Some say local authorities have lifted the mandate too soon, forcing them to either create their own rules and battle with unruly customers, or put their customers and staff at risk.
‘A bad call for our community’
The local change, announced by Public Health Madison & Dane County on Feb. 14, took effect just a few days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced new guidelines on masking. The federal agency had previously recommended that Americans wear masks indoors if they live in a part of the country where COVID case counts are high. Under the new guidance, areas are designated as high-, medium-, or low-risk based not on case counts but on what fraction of COVID patients are being hospitalized and what fraction of hospital beds those patients are taking up.
To Juarez, that’s sufficient. “We trust Dane County. We follow that … We trust what the science says,” he said, noting that he and the others at Barrio Dance will return to using masks if the local authorities change their guidance in the event of a new strain of the virus, for example.
But Gretchen Treu, co-owner of A Room Of One's Own bookstore, calls the decision to end the mandate “a bad call for our community.” The bookstore has shown great caution throughout the pandemic, closing for in-person browsing for more than 18 months in an effort to protect staff and customers. It welcomed customers to its new location on Atwood Avenue in October 2021 before closing for most of January due to the Omicron surge.
A sign on the door of A Room of One's Own in Madison notifies customers that masks are still required.
“Lifting restrictions is a terrible abdication of community responsibility and will make things harder for those members of our communities who are immunocompromised or too young to vaccinate,” Treu said in an email, arguing that the move would prolong the pandemic and provide more opportunities to for “new and nastier” variants to develop.
Treu said the new CDC guidance ignores the fact that for as long as COVID circulates, otherwise healthy people with “long-term serious health concerns” will be forced to restrict their activities in order to try to stay safe. And as a parent of a 2-year-old, Treu worries about other kids too young to get vaccinated.
For now, the store will continue to require staff and customers to wear masks. But Treu said they’re “tired and upset” that they have to enforce that policy without county backing.
Treu anticipates that the lifting of the mandate will cost the store money, including for masks it provides customers, staff time spent monitoring the door, paid time off for staff who test positive and “most intensively, when we inevitably have to close to the public again due to rising rates, new variants, and too many staff out sick for us to operate.”
“We're spending time, money, and stress with very little hope that it will do much good, since so many other people are choosing to act as though the most vulnerable people among us don't matter,” Treu said.
Will business owners set their own rules?
At south side Mexican restaurant El Panzón, co-owner Anahi Rojas Muñoz agrees that the change came too soon. She wishes that county public health authorities had kept the mandate in place for a few months more.
“I think we need to wait a little longer because we have older people who are more affected, even if they’re vaccinated,” Rojas said. “I’ve heard on the radio that having the vaccine doesn’t mean that you’re 100% safe.”
Masks can be a minor nuisance, she said, but she’s planning to keep wearing hers whenever she interacts with customers, and she’ll be asking her staff to do the same. She thinks it’s one way to help other people feel safer about going out while COVID is still circulating.
“For me, yes, it’s uncomfortable to wear a mask, but if you think about it, we’re also protecting ourselves from everything that could happen,” Rojas said.
As for the customers who visit her restaurant on South Midvale Boulevard, just off the Beltline, she’d like them to wear masks, but she’s not comfortable setting her own rules. Already, some customers from other areas have pushed back when she’s told them that Dane County still requires masks, telling her that where they live, masks aren’t required.
“I tell them, ‘Well, here (in Dane County), we haven’t gotten rid of that rule yet,’” Rojas said.
Now, without the county rule to point to, she thinks customers will be yet more resistant. “Sometimes it can be difficult to make people understand,” Rojas said. “Sometimes they get upset … I can’t be so demanding because people will say, ‘There’s no rule anymore, so I’m not wearing it anymore.’”
In a 2020 photo, co-owner of El Panzon restaurant Anahi Rojas Muñoz slices limes put at her restaurant in Madison.
Wisconsin Latino Chamber of Commerce president Jessica Cavazos thinks it was time to do away with the mandate, but she hopes customers will respect the rules business owners now set.
“A lot of our small businesses, they just don't understand that that is a right of theirs, just like ‘No shirt, no shoes, no service,’” Cavazos said. “It's the same thing: We request that, to keep a safe environment, you have to wear a mask.” Still, recalling viral videos of belligerent customers refusing to wear masks in restaurants or airports, she notes that enforcing those rules could be a challenge.
In this next stage, Cavazos anticipates that customers will choose to patronize businesses that don’t require masks, while others will search out those that do. “I think that's what makes our country that much greater: we have the choice. We can go to the businesses that feel and believe as we believe, and I think there's something for everyone out there.”
Indeed, some on social media have already begun compiling lists of Madison-area businesses that plan to continue requiring masks for now. Madison music and culture publication Tone Madison and newsletter Madison Minutes are currently gathering information about COVID safety precautions being used at performance venues around town.
Meanwhile, at his personal training fitness studio on Monroe Street, The Fit co-owner Jeff Liggon is trying to make sure that people of both camps will feel comfortable. It’s just one more adjustment for Liggon, who spent about eight months doing only online workouts before shifting to a hybrid model and eventually returning to a fully in-person set-up.
“It's not as simple for us as a gym to just say, ‘Oh, we're not wearing masks,’” Liggon said. Though he thinks that all of his clients are vaccinated, he anticipates that some will feel more comfortable continuing to wear masks for now. “There's different personalities, and different people have different levels of tolerance. We have to take that into account before we start making decisions on stuff.”
Though the studio is not requiring masks, Liggon said the staff have emphasized that clients are welcome to wear masks if they prefer.
“It's just a language thing,” he said. “We just allow people to kind of make that decision themselves, and no one seems to feel pressured in any real way in this space.”
