Boulder Adjusts to Life B.C.: Before COVID

The weather in advance of the metro area’s wintry blast was gorgeous on Sunday, February 20, and Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall was swarming with shoppers – among them a pair of women who seemed pleasantly surprised by the scene. “Wow,” one said to her companion. “This is what it was like Before COVID.”

These last two words deserve capital letters. Like people of every description around the globe, Boulder residents have ached for the days when they could gather in public places without having to don face coverings or worry about how close they could get to someone else without the risk of contracting a potentially fatal disease. And while this past weekend didn’t mark the official end of the pandemic, it represented a step in that direction. The previous Friday, Boulder County’s the county’s mask mandate for public indoor spaces officially came to an end – and if anyone thought a majority of Boulderites would stick with their N95s a bit longer just in case, they were wrong.

Way wrong.

Of course, there’s no guarantee this scenario will last. Back on July 1, 2021, Westword published a post headlined “Even Boulder Is Over Masks,” about three weeks after Boulder County Public Health lifted a previous face-covering order. Just over two months later, on September 2, BCPH put a new mask edict in place amid a surge of cases related to COVID’s Delta variant. At that time, Boulder was virtually alone in making such a move; Denver didn’t impose similar masking rules until November 24, just before the arrival of the Omicron wave.

Likewise, Boulder’s latest mask decree lingered longer than others in the metro area (Denver’s dropped on February 4), and even when the county announced it would remove the mandate, its February 14 news release about the policy shift suggested continued face-covering use. One line read: “BCPH strongly recommends individuals 2+ wear an N95, KN95, KF94 or equivalent medical-grade mask over your nose and mouth while indoors and consider wearing a mask in crowded outdoor settings while the county remains at a level of substantial or high transmission.”

This suggestion wasn’t widely embraced by those who gathered Sunday on the Pearl Street Mall. At most, only one out of ten people outside was masked, and patrons with face coverings inside businesses topped out in the 20-30 percent range.

Some shops required employees to wear masks, but they represented a decided minority, too. And although some outlets still had “Masks Required” signs on their doors or windows, this seemed more of an oversight than a proactive decision.

Still, during our time on the mall, we saw quite a few folks holding masks in their hand as they stepped into a store, just in case they were asked to put it on – which none of them were. That suggests that much of Boulder’s citizenry would be ready to remask without complaint should a new variant cause COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths to zoom upward again.

For now, though, most prefer to revel in the latest version of Boulder B.C.