As coronavirus cases surge across the state, Arizona’s Republican governor said he would no longer block mayors from being able to require local residents to wear masks. But governor Doug Ducey held off from issuing a statewide mask-wearing requirement, even after hundreds of Arizona medical professionals sent him an open letter this week, outlining the evidence that masks save lives and asking him to require citizens to wear them. Mask-wearing has become a charged partisan issue in Arizona, one of the key swing states in the 2020 election. Donald Trump is expected to visit the state for a rally next week, even as coronavirus cases and deaths are rising rapidly. For days, the Democratic mayors of Phoenix and Tucson, the state’s two largest cities, have been speaking out, asking Ducey to change the executive order that has blocked them from mandating any public health guidelines in addition to the ones that the governor himself had approved. “If he’s not willing to make the necessary steps to protect Arizonans, he should untie the hands of mayors and public health officials, to let us take the steps that we need to do,” the Tucson mayor, Regina Romero, said on Wednesday morning, before the governor announced he was changing course. “Every single day counts,” she said. “Every day we wait on this really costs us people’s lives.” Ducey conceded on Wednesday that Arizona was headed in a dangerous direction, with nearly 2,400 new coronavirus cases announced on Tuesday and another 1,800 announced on Wednesday, and hospitals reporting that intensive care units are already at more than 80% capacity. “There’s indications that we are not out of the woods,” he said. Arizona’s former public health director Will Humble, who served under a previous Republican governor, has been arguing publicly that requiring masks, at least in indoor spaces like grocery stores, is an essential step to flatten the curve and keep Arizona hospitals from being overwhelmed. Without any change in the state’s public health policies, the latest model from researchers at Arizona State University projected that Arizona hospitals could run out of hospital beds in late June or early July and have to shift into “surge status”, Humble said on Wednesday morning. “You should be honest with people: that comes with a different standard of care,” Humble said. While he did not mandate masks statewide, Ducey said that wearing a face mask was “an issue of personal responsibility” and that ““every Arizonan” should wear one. Following reports that Arizona’s bars, nightclubs, and casinos have been crowded over the past month, Ducey said businesses needed to observe social distancing and capacity guidelines. He also defended plans for Trump to hold a large rally in the state next week. “There are voluntary events,” he said. “We are going to protect peoples’ right to assemble in an election year.” Jonathan Nez, the president of the Navajo Nation, which has seen one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the US, announced new weekend lockdowns on Tuesday, citing concerns about troubling numbers in Arizona. The Navajo Nation, unlike the state of Arizona, has already required residents to wear masks. “I truly believe wearing masks helps slow down the spread of COVID-19,” Nez told a local news outlet. “And in the state of Arizona there’s no public health order that mandates citizens to wear masks, and maybe that is a factor in this real big spike.” During its peak, the Navajo Nation sent the sickest patients from the reservation to larger hospitals in Arizona and New Mexico. That might not be an option if hospitals in Arizona became overwhelmed with patients, Nez said. The Associated Press contributed to this report