The Covid Truths Come Out

As we enter another year of the pandemic, once-taboo notions are now becoming mainstream.

A s the Omicron wave of Covid-19 washed over the American Northeast and started to spread nationwide, familiar public-health officials and commentators suddenly started to say things that were previously unsayable. And CDC guidance started changing rapidly.

Things such as “your masks are useless.” And “the hospitalization figures for Covid in children are overcounted.” And “we need to stop focusing on cases and start focusing on hospitalizations.” And even that public-health regulations had to retreat to the point at which they would be tolerated by the public.

It’s important to note that none of these insights became true with the onset of Omicron, which is extremely contagious but less severe and infects vaccinated people easily. This isn’t guidance changing with the latest science. No, Omicron only made these facts more undeniable.

Cloth Masks Barely Work

Just before Christmas, Dr. Leana Wen, former head of Planned Parenthood, adviser to the White House, and frequent guest on CNN, said

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.@DrLeanaWen: "Don't wear a cloth mask. Cloth masks are little more than facial decorations. There's no place for them in light of Omicron." pic.twitter.com/Kpoj18sxdi

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) December 21, 2021

As the New Year began, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former head of the FDA and my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, said, “Cloth masks aren’t going to provide a lot of protection, that’s the bottom line. This is an airborne illness. We now understand that, and a cloth mask is not going to protect you from a virus that spreads through airborne transmission. It could protect better through droplet transmission, something like the flu, but not something like this coronavirus.”

Nice that the reasoning has nothing to do with the characteristics of Omicron, but with Covid itself. We’ve known Covid was airborne since the late summer of 2020 and had good indications that this was true long before then, from the first anecdotes of spread in China.

That cloth masks have extremely limited efficacy — or are actively harmful — is of course a reversion to the original position stated by Dr. Anthony Fauci himself, who wrote and said in public, “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material.” That was before Dr. Fauci himself began wearing the masks he believed were almost useless. Though, to be fair, he all but let the truth out by calling them a “symbol.”

Imagine that you were thrown off a plane because your child had an asthma attack and couldn’t wear his “symbol.” Imagine all the hassle and grief in school districts, forcing students to wear masks that offer little or no protection. Imagine you’re in New York State, where a vaccinated speech therapist cannot legally give therapy to a child unless a “useless face decoration” is obscuring the movements of his mouth, and the sounds coming out of his voice box.

When leading public officials and even the presidents are themselves wearing these masks, it does no good to point out that they had occasionally promoted surgical masks or N95s as more effective options. The public’s trust was simply and flagrantly abused.

At some point, public-health officials might be candid that the study upon which the CDC’s recommendation for masking children in schools is filled with data from scores of schools that didn’t even meet in person.

Wen wants to denigrate cloth masks in favor of N95s, which are harder to breathe in and whose effectiveness drops to near zero when not fitted perfectly. But this only raises a question. If the cloth masks that most students wore in school the past two years, and most travelers wore on planes, provide so little protection, why not just ditch them altogether? The results over the last year showed that schools were not in fact the locus of transmission in communities, and — if anything — acted as a mild brake on them. Low-value “face decorations” can be dropped.

With, Not Because

For years, it was considered akin to a conspiracy theory to mention that some people were hospitalized or died “with Covid” not “because of Covid.”

But Dr. Fauci, perhaps recognizing that refusing to talk about this phenomenon could lead to panic, finally went on MSNBC and said that the sudden rise of juvenile Covid hospitalizations was an “overcount.”

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"When you have such a large volume of infections among children, even with a low level of rate of infection, you’re going to still see a lot more children who get hospitalized," Dr. Anthony Fauci said.

STORY: https://t.co/qE4rya3ETT pic.twitter.com/VxkSUA9Jda

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) December 30, 2021

Again, this is not something that only suddenly became true because of Omicron. Before the Delta wave, a study of California hospitals showed that 40-45 percent of minors hospitalized with Covid had only incidental infections. That is, they were in the hospital for other reasons —  everything from broken limbs to childhood cancers — but they tested positive for Covid while in the hospital. The overcounting effect has only been exaggerated with the new variant. Yet the stats on juvenile Covid outcomes are stated in their most dire, overcounted form when they are used by the CDC to justify America’s guidance for safely running schools — guidance that is much more strict than in peer nations.

Get More Intolerant

You may also have noticed that the CDC changed its guidance, shortening its recommended quarantine from ten days to five days after an infection with Covid-19. The science informing this decision is over a year old, but apparently the interest in conforming the CDC’s recommendations to it only picked up once a wave was really crushing blue America. CDC director Rochelle Walensky also explained that it wasn’t just the science, and it “really had a lot to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate.”

Ah! We can finally talk about how recommendations by public-health officials are not merely translations of “the science” into policy, but involve the complex art of governing, of aligning means to ends, and judging the political conditions. There is also the implicit message that restrictions will fall away as the public demonstrates more impatience with them.

It’s a new year, and our leaders are making it clear that the only thing between us and a recognition of endemic Covid is our own tolerance for their disruptions and guidance. Let’s resolve to be the rowdy, difficult, ungovernable mess that we always have been.