The evidence cautions against interpreting Mayor Bower’s Covid-mitigation measures as coherent public-health policy.
The evidence cautions against interpreting Mayor Bower’s Covid-mitigation measures as coherent public-health policy.
M uriel Bowser, the mayor of the District of Columbia, has announced a raft of new measures intended to combat Covid-19. Effective December 21, 2021, Bowser’s government reinstated the mask mandate that it had ended on November 22. On January 15, it also imposed vaccine requirements in public spaces such as gyms and restaurants.
Does the evidence justify Bowser’s extraordinary new measures? The chart above offers data for your consideration. During the roughly four weeks in which D.C.’s mask mandate was not in force, America’s capitol city registered 14 homicides — and eleven deaths from Covid-19.
The data call attention to a contrast between Mayor Bowser’s approach toward gun violence — which she has declared a public-health crisis — and her approach to Covid-19. Focused “on the people and the places most likely to experience gun violence using a collaborative, whole-community, public health approach,” the District’s latest anti-crime interventions target high-risk city blocks. Its latest series of Covid-19 mandates, by contrast, does not make any set of distinctions between high and low-risk parts of the city.
Mayor Bowser’s public-health policies, then, offer a new twist on Nietzsche’s aphorism that “there are no facts, only interpretations.” There are facts, it seems, that caution against interpreting them as reflections of a coherent set of public-health principles.