Watching elected Democrats and public-health officials over the past week has been like watching a flock of birds take a sudden, sharp turn overhead. A new season has begun: electoral season. This reversal of direction on pandemic restrictions inspires nothing less than knee-trembling awe at the unseen, mysterious principle of coordination at work.
Perhaps it is the polls showing that Biden’s approval rating has dipped below 40 percent for the first time. Or maybe it was the recent surveys of registered voters showing that only 16 percent of the public said they trusted information from the president on Covid-19, and only 31 percent trusted it from Anthony Fauci. Maybe it was connected to the view of the majority of the country that the pandemic would never end. Then there was the Monmouth University poll finding that 70 percent of the country wants to “accept Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with life.”
Democratic governors in Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, and Illinois have announced an imminent end to their indoor mask mandates. New York’s governor Kathy Hochul let her indoor mask mandate expire this week. In Nevada, all mask mandates were ended as of Thursday afternoon. An announcement is forthcoming in California. And it is not just the elected officials who are shifting in the breeze. Dr. Leana Wen, a White House adviser and frequent presence on CNN, was urging the whole country to upgrade their masks to medical respirators just a few weeks ago; now she is urging the public to accept that endemic Covid means an easing of restrictions.
This is all to be welcomed. But it’s not enough. And not nearly fast enough.
The removal of restrictions on children is agonizingly slow. Illinois and New York have been fighting in court to keep their school mask mandates going. Massachusetts will end its statewide school mask mandate on February 28. New Jersey is keeping its school mask mandate until the second week of March. California’s Gavin Newsom will announce an “endemic Covid” plan to ease restrictions imminently. New York’s Hochul says she wants to see the results of February break and will reassess the school mandate in March.
What in the world are these governors waiting for? The winter seasonal wave of Covid-19 is ending across the entirety of the country. Improvements in treatment, more uptake of the Covid vaccines, and a decrease of virulence meant that, despite astonishingly high numbers of cases and infections happening over Christmas and into the New Year, America’s health-care system — depleted and fatigued as it is — could cope with the result. The White House is seeking to change the way Covid hospitalizations are counted to reflect the new, reassuring reality that severe cases are declining.
More to the point, mask mandates made little or no appreciable difference during the Omicron surge. Governor John Carney of Delaware and Hochul in New York credited them with ending the wave, but neighboring states without restrictions suffered just as much — or as little — as New York and Delaware did. Credible studies from the U.K. show that school mask mandates do not provide significant public-health benefits.
The mental-health crisis among American youth that a recent surgeon-general report showed to be so dire still needs to be addressed. Anecdotal evidence is pouring in warning of a tidal wave of developmental and speech-delay problems in the very young. Children need their childhoods restored to them. Depriving them longer can no longer be justified.
If the imperative for children isn’t enough, consider that the eerie, empty major-city downtowns and the depressed state of the service-sector economy are also connected to the last remaining Covid restrictions and the still-extant belief among the most neurotic and hypochondriacal that normal life can never return.
Yes, it is true that some East Asian nations, small island outposts, and high-trust European societies vaccinated more people. But America had a huge hand in creating the most effective vaccines for Covid-19, and we achieved the fastest uptake of a vaccine in the nation’s history, despite record-low trust in our public institutions. Among the gargantuan democracies of the world — Brazil, India, Mexico — our response was not only miles better, but crucial to the reopening of the world economy.
It’s time for Americans to celebrate their successes and unmask the children.