Denver County will end its months-long school and child-care facility mask order after Feb. 25, the city’s public health department announced Wednesday morning.

The order will formally expire at midnight on Feb. 26, the city’s Department of Public Health and Environment said in a statement. The change follows similar moves in Jefferson, Adams and Arapahoe counties, where school mask orders are ending amid a steady drop in COVID-19 cases. Denver ended its broader indoor mask order last week.

“With the current decline in severe cases and the high rates of immunity that we’re seeing, it is safe to lift the school mask mandate at this time,” Sterling McLaren, Denver’s chief medical officer, said in a statement.

Cases have dropped significantly in the metro and across the state over the past three weeks. The omicron wave, which ignited in mid-December and led to unprecedented case and positivity rates shortly after, has been subsiding since mid-January. Denver, for instance, was averaging just over 2,000 new cases per day on Jan. 10. By last week, that number had fallen to below 450.

Bob McDonald, the executive director of the city’s health department, said in the statement that removing the mask requirement “is the right thing for students” at this point. He said the city will “closely monitor the situation in schools and childcare facilities and act accordingly if any changes with COVID-19 take place.”

When Denver officials announced last week that the indoor mask order was ending, they said face-coverings in schools made sense because of state quarantine requirements. Unmasked students who were exposed to COVID-19 in schools, they said, would lead to more disruption. They indicated a change to state policy would help smooth the path for Denver to end masking in schools.

A spokeswoman for the agency told the Gazette on Tuesday that the health department was working with the state on those rules. In its announcement Wednesday, the health department said it was “continuing to work with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment on outbreak, quarantine and isolation guidance for schools. More information is expected in the next week.”

Just like businesses generally, school districts and individual childcare facilities have the ability to institute their own face-covering requirements. A message sent to Denver Public Schools seeking comment on the change was not immediately returned Wednesday morning.

In a statement posted online shortly after the health department announced the change, Tay Anderson – the vice president of DPS’s school board – said he had “deep concern” about ending the requirement and cited federal guidance recommending the continued use of masks indoors and in schools.

“Personally I believe that this decision disregards our immunocompromised students, educators, and families,” he wrote.

At one point, Anderson had floated the idea of making masks part of the DPS dress code, as at least one school district in Texas has done. He wrote in his Wednesday statement that he didn’t feel he had the votes to move forward with that proposal.

The shift is the latest sign of public health officials’ optimism about the state of the pandemic here. In recent weeks, mask mandates have ended in Denver, Arapahoe, Adams, Summit and Eagle counties. Larimer and Jefferson counties have both announced theirs will lift later this month.

Cases have now fallen to a quarter of their omicron wave highs and are back below the delta wave’s fall peak. A team of researchers wrote late last month that roughly 80% of state is likely to be immune to omicron by mid-February. Between high vaccination and infection rates, they wrote, Colorado should have a few months of relative calm, though a new variant emerging could throw that prediction into the wood chipper.