The Colorado governor restores a sense of proportion to the Covid debates. New York’s governor shows off her ‘vaxed’ necklace and reimposes mandates.
The Colorado governor restores a sense of proportion to the Covid debates. New York’s governor shows off her ‘vaxed’ necklace and reimposes mandates.
‘T he emergency is over,” said the Democratic governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, Friday night. He seems to recognize that the most effective intervention that humanity is likely to come up with against Covid has been out for a year now. With new therapeutics a few weeks away, perhaps, there is little sense in trying to control Covid with the massively disruptive and largely ineffective medieval techniques of . . . hiding in our homes, or behind a veil of cloth or thin paper. “Public health [officials] don’t get to tell people what to wear; that’s just not their job,” Polis said.
He is even willing to stand behind it. When an interviewer probed Polis by quoting a health-care worker who was demanding a statewide mask mandate, he was polite but curt: “Public-health [officials] would say to always wear a mask because it decreases flu” and decreases other airborne illnesses, he said. “But that’s not something that you [the state] require.”
Finally. Someone on team blue willing to say that elected officials are in charge, not experts.
Meanwhile, New York is governed by a woman, Kathy Hochul, who got a nameplate necklace spelling the word “Vaxed” to commemorate her immunization to Covid-19. Hochul is reimposing mask mandates. Case rates, an uptick in hospitalizations, and her disapproval of vaccination rates mean that all indoor businesses are supposed to require masks unless they are enforcing a vaccine-passport system of their own ensuring that every person on their premises is vaccinated. Each violation is punishable by a $1,000 fine. Already several counties in New York have announced that they will not enforce the mandate.
This is the tale of two Democrats, and it’s a preview of the Covid debate to come. Red America has largely stopped debating any new Covid-19 measures. But Blue America has not yet figured out whether it wants normality, what it can live with, and at what cost to them electorally and economically.
The difference between the two is obvious at this point. Governor Polis gives some weight to individual freedom. Governor Hochul is just looking at the stats.
Giving weight to freedom doesn’t mean discounting the science or expertise. Polis is just as quick as other Democratic governors to cite data showing that the vaccines are effective and that the vast majority of those hospitalized for Covid in his state are unvaccinated. But this means recognizing that the state has limited resources and that, at this point, those who do not want to get vaccinated are committed to that decision and would not change their views absent extremely punitive measures, which would be costly and would probably cost the governor some of his popular support.
But we need to ask Governor Hochul and others who share her approach: What other data do you need to see? We’ve seen that vaccine uptake in the United Kingdom led to a major change in the relationship of cases and deaths. Cases went up, but deaths didn’t follow at the previous rates, leading to a decoupling of cases from hospitalizations and deaths in the United Kingdom. So why shouldn’t we expect the same in the United States?
Can New York State or any state in the United States point to unique health gains from masking children? The United States has been unique in the world for masking young children throughout the schoolday, even to the point of making them sit outside on buckets in the freezing cold to eat while socially distanced. Surely states like New York would continue this policy only if there was massive, convincing evidence that it was helping New York achieve public-health gains that the rest of the world was foolishly leaving on the table. Well, if you believe that, there’s a bridge Kathy Hochul could sell you.
If the new Omicron variant is as contagious as the early data suggest, then all the “data-driven” decisions are about to be driven into a ditch, especially if — as all the early data seem to indicate — this turns out to be an especially mild form of Covid-19. We will see huge upticks in “cases” and rates of positivity. If the Omicron variant spreads this way, it will also turn up in many patients who are already — for other reasons — in the hospital. But this “wave” would be different from previous ones in that so many millions — the vast majority — have some level of immunity to it, either through vaccines or previous Covid infections.
Blue-state governors need to learn very quickly that “the numbers” mean something very different in late 2021 from what they did in 2020. If they don’t, they’ll convince themselves to try to cancel Christmas plans again. At what cost?