AUSTIN, Texas — New cases of COVID-19 and hospitalizations are down significantly and the Austin-Travis County region has been downgraded to Stage 4 of risk-based guidelines.

What You Need To Know

  • The Austin ISD Board of Trustees will meet Wednesday to discuss making mask-wearing optional in schools and district facilities

  • The meeting comes as COVID-19 cases are down and the CDC has significantly loosened its mask guidance

  • Students, staff and visitors will still be required to wear masks at district facilities this week

  • District leaders will meet with officials with the City of Austin, Travis County and Austin Public Health prior to Wednesday’s meeting

On top of that, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week loosened its mask-wearing guidelines.

Austin ISD looks like it will soon follow suit.

According to the district, the Austin ISD Board of Trustees will meet Wednesday to discuss making masks optional at schools and other district facilities.

Masks will remain required for students, staff and visitors this week, however.

Ahead of the meeting, district leaders will meet with City of Austin officials, Austin Public Health and Travis County leaders to discuss how the mask-optional protocol will be implemented.

Round Rock ISD and Dallas ISD have already dropped their mask requirements.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday announced a change to the metrics it uses to determine whether to recommend face coverings, shifting from looking at COVID-19 case counts to a more holistic view of risk from the coronavirus to a community. Under previous guidelines, masks were recommended for people residing in communities of substantial or high transmission.

"The metrics that we specifically are relying on here for these COVID-19 community levels don't reflect data that were stood up in summer of 2020 specifically for pandemic response data collection through the unified hospital data system," an official said Friday.

"So this is really a phenomenal data source that allows us to, on a daily basis, assess how many new hospitalizations that have been in hospital for people with confirmed COVID-19 and the percent hospital capacity and hospital beds in use by people with COVID-19."

The new metrics will place communities into one of three transmission zones, rather than the previous four: low, medium and high, color-coded as green, yellow and orange. Individuals who are at high risk of contracting COVID-19, such as immunocompromized individuals, are still recommended to wear a mask regardless of where they reside.

The new metrics will still consider caseloads, but also take into account hospitalizations and local hospital capacity, which have been markedly improved during the emergence of the omicron variant. That strain is highly transmissible, but indications are that it is less severe than earlier strains, particularly for people who are fully vaccinated and boosted. Under the new guidelines, the vast majority of Americans will no longer live in areas where indoor masking in public is recommended, based on current data.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.