ALBANY, NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - New York's indoor mask mandate will remain in effect after an appeals court judge on Tuesday (Jan 25) temporarily blocked a lower-court ruling from a day before that had abruptly struck down the policy and created confusion across schools and businesses.

The decision Tuesday came one day after a ruling by Justice Thomas Rademaker, of state Supreme Court in Nassau County, who had said the rule requiring masks violated the state Constitution.

His ruling had abruptly nullified part of the rule imposed by Governor Kathy Hochul last month, amid a surge in coronavirus cases driven by the Omicron variant, that required masks or proof of full vaccination at all indoor public spaces statewide.

Ms Hochul immediately vowed to fight the decision, with Ms Letitia James, the state Attorney-General, filing a motion to stay the ruling in an attempt to put it on hold while the state filed a formal appeal.

On Tuesday afternoon, following a brief hearing, Justice Robert Miller, the state appeals court judge, sided with the state and granted the stay, effectively allowing the mask rule to go back into effect temporarily. Mr Miller scheduled another hearing on the matter for Friday morning.

Ms Hochul, a Democrat from Buffalo, applauded the appeals court Tuesday "for siding with common sense and granting an interim stay to keep the state's important masking regulations in place."

Despite the reprieve, the ruling injected a jolt of uncertainty across the state at a time when New York is still grappling with a surge in coronavirus cases and hospitalisations.

It left parents and teachers scrambling to decipher whether children would be required to wear masks in schools, and it revived political flashpoints over mask-wearing, with the state's top Republicans celebrating the initial ruling Monday.

While officials said the ruling only affected the state mask rule and did not supersede any local or federal rules around masking, state officials scrambled Monday night to let hundreds of school districts know that they should continue to follow the mask rule while the legal issues were ironed out.

Before the stay was granted, some schools, especially on Long Island, where mask mandates have become particularly divisive, said they would take Mr Rademaker's decision as license to shift their policies.

They informed parents through late night and early morning posts on their websites and social media pages that masks would be optional for staff and students Tuesday.

Mr John Stimmel, the superintendent of public schools in Sayville, a hamlet in Suffolk County, said that he had received "hundreds" of emails from people concerned about the mask policy but that schools in his district would make masks optional.

The Rockville Centre school district, also on Long Island, told parents at 10pm Monday that mask-wearing would be optional. By 7am Tuesday, parents had received another email that revised the announcement and reinstated the mandatory masking policy.

Ms Rachel Price Ferrick, 43, whose children in the district are 6 and 8 years old, said that she had sent her children to school in masks but that the quick reversal had led to confusion.

She said she believed her children had fallen behind on their reading and social skills in part because masks had limited their classroom interactions and said she was frustrated that masks were being required in part to accommodate people who had not yet been vaccinated.

"At this point, if you have chosen not to vaccinate yourself, that's your choice, but you're on your own," Ms Price Ferrick said. "It can't fall on the shoulders of our children anymore."

Other school districts were more hesitant to immediately drop mask-wearing requirements, including in North Colonie, near Albany, where officials said Tuesday that the district would continue to require masks in schools.

The ruling also did not reverse local mandates. In New York City, for example, City Hall officials emphasised that the ruling had no effect on its school policies, which were in place before the state mandate and require that children and staff members wear masks in schools.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, for its part, sought to reassure riders that the ruling had no effect on the city's subways and buses or its regional commuter trains, noting that federal regulations required masks on public transit.

The state-run system's yellow-uniformed crew of volunteers, known as the Mask Force, fanned out Tuesday to give out free masks to riders.

Mr Rademaker, who has run as a Democrat and a Republican as well as on the Conservative Party line, was elected to the Supreme Court in Nassau County in 2019. The Supreme Court in New York is the highest trial court in the state but not the court of last resort; the Court of Appeal is the highest court.

The case before Mr Rademaker concerned issues related to masks in schools, but he took issue with Ms Hochul's mask rule more broadly.

He pointed in a six-page ruling to the fact that lawmakers had scaled back the emergency powers they had temporarily granted the executive branch to respond to the pandemic when former Governor Andrew Cuomo was in office.

As such, he said, Ms Hochul, who replaced Mr Cuomo after he resigned in August, needed consent from state lawmakers to impose the mask rule, even if her intentions were "well aimed."

The Omicron surge has been receding in New York, but it is not over. An average of about 20,000 people in the state are now testing positive for the coronavirus each day, down sharply from the surge's peak of 90,000 people who tested positive Jan 7. The positivity rate has also fallen, by half, from more than 22 pre cent to 10 per cent.

Hospitals remain under strain, and while hospitalisations have begun declining, they remain higher than at any point since May 2020. More than 130 people each day have been dying of the virus statewide.