State and territorial executive orders, administrative orders, resolutions, and proclamations are collected from government websites and cataloged and coded using Microsoft Excel by one coder with one or more additional coders conducting quality assurance.

Data were collected to determine when members of the public in states and territories were subject to state and territorial executive orders, administrative orders, resolutions, and proclamations for COVID-19 that require them to wear masks in public. “Members of the public” are defined as individuals operating in a personal capacity. “In public” is defined to mean either (1) anywhere outside the home or (2) both in retail businesses and in restaurants/food establishments. Data consists exclusively of state and territorial orders, many of which apply to specific counties within their respective state or territory; therefore, data is broken down to the county level.

These data are derived from publicly available state and territorial executive orders, administrative orders, resolutions, and proclamations (“orders”) for COVID-19 that expressly require individuals to wear masks in public found by the CDC, COVID-19 Community Intervention & Critical Populations Task Force, Monitoring & Evaluation Team, Mitigation Policy Analysis Unit, Center for State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Support, Public Health Law Program, and Max Gakh, Assistant Professor, School of Public Health, University of Nevada, Las Vegas from April 10, 2020 through August 15, 2021. These data will be updated as new orders are collected. Any orders not available through publicly accessible websites are not included in these data. Only official copies of the documents or, where official copies were unavailable, official press releases from government websites describing requirements were coded; news media reports on restrictions were excluded. Recommendations not included in an order are not included in these data. Effective and expiration dates were coded using only the dates provided; no distinction was made based on the specific time of the day the order became effective or expired. These data do not include data on counties that have opted out of their state mask mandate pursuant to state law. These data do not necessarily represent an official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.