Most families in Virginia support precautions such as masks in schools. “He keeps saying things about, ‘Oh, it’s parent choice,’ but he’s actually going against the majority of parents,” Paterson said of Youngkin.

Two-thirds of Virginia parents with students in public schools supported mask mandates in a September 2021 poll – slightly higher than the 61% of Americans nationally who supported the mandates in a November survey. Both surveys were conducted before the highest rise in Covid cases so far seen in the pandemic.

“I would think the Omicron wave made people more nervous, not less,” said Neal McCluskey, an education analyst at the Cato Institute…

“It’s too soon to roll back protections, full stop,” said Emily Smith, an assistant professor at the George Washington University’s School of Public Health. “We are still seeing massive outbreaks of infection. We’re still seeing health systems overloaded. And that’s because we haven’t come to this state of the world where transmission is predictable.”