The general public no longer needs to wear a mask in Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis announced Friday, bringing the state in line with federal guidance and largely ending the most visible sign of the pandemic’s effects on society.

Masks will no longer be required by the state for vaccinated or unvaccinated people, Polis told reporters Friday afternoon. Face coverings will still be required in schools, prisons, hospitals, child care settings and other specific, controlled locations. But even those lingering requirements will end June 1, and districts can choose to allow fully vaccinated students and staff to go without masks, Polis said.

Generally, the governor said, masking is now a recommendation by the state, not a requirement.

“This is a big step,” he said. “We’ve reached a level of immunity where the pandemic isn’t over but we’re safer.”

Individual businesses can still enact their own mask requirements, Polis said. He advised people to continue to keep a mask on them, and he predicted that some businesses, like grocery stores, would maintain a mask requirement. There may also be a mix of businesses that will either continue mandating masking for everyone, require them only for the unvaccinated or won’t mandate them at all.

Though businesses may implement a system to check patrons’ vaccination status before allowing them to go unmasked, Polis said that wasn’t something that could be scaled up to apply statewide.

“We do not believe there’s any comprehensive way to do that across society,” he said of hinging a mask requirement on a person’s vaccination status. “There’s no comprehensive way to have a state vaccination passport. It violates people’s privacy, there’s no practical way to implement it.” 

The state’s order on large events will remain in place through June 1, but the governor said he anticipates not renewing it. That would signal the end of state-level public health measures limiting behavior to blunt the spread of the virus.

“We’re getting closer and closer to the end of the pandemic,” he said, praising the “milestone” of ending required masking.

He urged Coloradans to get vaccinated and said masks could no longer be used as a “crutch” to avoid infection while unvaccinated. 

The change in Colorado comes just 24 hours after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidance Thursday, which said that fully vaccinated people don’t need to wear masks in most indoor settings. 

CDC director Rochelle Walensky told reporters Thursday that evidence from the U.S. and Israel shows the vaccines are as strongly protective in real world use as they were in earlier studies, and that so far they continue to work even though some worrying mutated versions of the virus are spreading.

On Thursday afternoon, hours after the CDC released its guidance and President Joe Biden declared it “a great day for America,” Colorado chief medical officer Eric France said state health officials would review the new recommendations and how they would impact the state’s order. He said then that he anticipated the review and any changes coming in a matter of days.

Early Thursday evening, a spokeswoman for Polis’ office told the Gazette and several other media outlets that the masking order would be changed “shortly” to align with the CDC.

The effective ending of the statewide mask mandate is the most significant in a recent wave of rolled back restrictions. Masks have long been the most visible sign of the virus’s transformation of daily life, and face coverings, like many COVID-19 restrictions, have often become a political battleground.

“We’re ready to return to normal because so many people are vaccinated,” Polis said Friday.

As vaccines have flowed over the past several weeks, the face covering order itself had been whittled down. Prior to Friday’s news, the order only applied when there were more than 10 people in a room and when 80% of people in indoor spaces weren’t vaccinated. The state has otherwise largely stopped regulating COVID-19 response measures, and many Colorado counties have rolled back capacity restrictions. This weekend, most of the metro area will end the bulk of COVID-19 limitations on capacity and distancing, loosening restrictions to the most significant degree since the pandemic began 14 months ago.

Elizabeth Carlton, a professor at the Colorado School of Public Health, said that the CDC’s new guidance was “a game changer” and a sign that the fully vaccinated can mostly “return to pre-pandemic life.” But she noted that it only applied to people who’ve been completely inoculated, which — as of Thursday — is far below 50% of Colorado’s population.

“That means 61% of the population should still be wearing masks, social distancing and avoiding crowded indoor spaces where people aren’t wearing masks,” she said. “We think there are a lot of people currently infected with SARS-CoV-2 in Colorado right now, so contacts are very risky for those who aren’t fully immunized.”

Jon Samet, the dean of the school of public health, called the change “very significant” and “probably justified.”

“Can’t say that there is no risk from mask-free living for the vaccinated, but certainly de minimus,” he wrote in an email Thursday evening. “Will be very hard to determine what the consequences are of removing the recommendation on masks for those who are vaccinated.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.