State of Emergency In Maryland Set To Expire

BALTIMORE, MD — Gov. Larry Hogan appears ready to let Maryland’s state of emergency from COVID-19 fully expire Sunday as planned, despite urging from some legislators to extend it further due to case increases from a highly contagious variant.

House of Delegates Speaker Adrienne Jones and several of her lieutenants — all of them Democrats — wrote the Republican governor on Friday asking him to reverse course and keep the emergency in place, The Baltimore Sun reported.

“Now is not the time to end the stated public health emergency -- not only because of the limitations it will put on our state response but also because of the message that it sends to the public at large about the urgency of this situation, particularly as we prepare to send our children back to school,” the legislators wrote.

Hogan and his staff have said the state remains well-positioned to weather the pandemic without a formal emergency designation, which began in March 2020.

A Hogan spokesman acknowledged the letter, thanking the legislators for noting Maryland is a pandemic response leader.

“Part of what has kept us a national leader is how we have incorporated our public health response — and all of the testing, tracing, surge capacity, and vaccine distribution infrastructure the state built from scratch — into the day-to-day operations of state government,” spokesman Mike Ricci said in a statement.

As in other parts of the country, cases have risen in Maryland in recent weeks due to the delta variant of the coronavirus. More than 520 people with COVID-19 were hospitalized as of Saturday, according to Maryland Department of Health data, compared to fewer than 100 a month ago.
Hogan announced in mid-June that Maryland would end most of the state’s pandemic restrictions on July 1, but the state of emergency remained in place to provide a transition for a number of legal and technical matters.

Actually, two orders will expire at 11:59 p.m. Sunday — a general state of emergency and the existence of a “catastrophic health emergency.”

State law allowed Hogan under the emergency to shut down schools and businesses, order people to stay at home and call up the National Guard. Dozens of other related orders also will expire Sunday, the newspaper reported.