Visitors to Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo will no longer be required to wear a mask starting this Friday, March 11.

The shift in policy “reflects recent guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local and national guidelines around masking indoors,” the organization said in a news release today.

Two of the most popular Smithsonian museums, the National Zoo and the National Museum of Natural History, will also expand their hours next week. Starting Monday, March 14, both will be open to the public for 7 days per week — a return to their pre-COVID-19 schedules. The zoo has most recently been closed Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, and the Museum of Natural History has been closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.

No other museum schedules are changing at this time, but the Smithsonian announcement suggests that the changes are the beginning of a “gradual transition” to expand schedules at other locations.

D.C. ended its vaccine requirements in February and its indoor mask mandate on March 1, and the federal government made similar moves last week, ending the mask mandate for fully vaccinated workers at the White House and in the House of Representatives.

COVID infections have fallen sharply in D.C. since the beginning of the year. The case rate was at 73 new cases per 100,000 people for the week of February 20, the most recently published data. At the beginning of January, the case rate was more than ten times that, at 865 cases per 100,000. Transmission is in the “low” category, as defined by the District’s COVID dashboard, and as of February 20, there was only one COVID-related hospitalization in the city, down from a high of 36 in early January.

The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention recently changed its pandemic guidance to local jurisdictions. The new guidance directs communities to add or subtract pandemic response measures — like masking or social distancing — based off of the availability of hospital beds, new hospitalizations due to COVID-19 infections, and cases per 100,000 residents, rather than primarily basing them off of the number of cases in a community. According to the new recommendations, about 70% of Americans live in places with “low” or “medium” COVID risk, and can stop wearing masks.