Even after mask mandates were dropped across the country amid dwindling COVID-19 cases and deaths, face coverings have still been required in many doctors’ offices, hospitals and other health care settings. Now, a group of esteemed medical experts is calling for a change. In an April 18 journal entry in the Annals of Internal Medicine, an academic medical journal, several physicians — including infectious disease specialists — wrote that it’s time to remove masking requirements in health care facilities. “While critically important in the earlier phases of the pandemic, we’ve entered a more stable phase, with substantial population-level immunity, durable protection against severe disease, a series of less virulent variants,…