‘The science’ has suddenly changed, so kids can go unmasked. And war in Ukraine has distracted us.
‘The science’ has suddenly changed, so kids can go unmasked. And war in Ukraine has distracted us.
D itching the Covid masks at school and starting 1950s-style air-raid drills wasn’t my idea of a return to normalcy, but I suppose I’ll take it. As Russia goes to its version of Defcon 1, Governor Kathy Hochul has announced that the science has suddenly changed, the CDC guidelines have suddenly changed, and indeed toddlers can now be unmasked in New York, where the Omicron wave ended over a month ago. No more take-home Covid tests, here come the iodine tablets.
New York can finally go back to being vaguely bad for your health, which it should be. New York City mayor Eric Adams announced the imminent end of Korean BBQ joints’ asking whether you got the juice and boost before entering their establishments to ruin your cardiovascular health.
Giving up the masks on kids means relenting, modifying, or at least redirecting your paranoia. The QAnon-ish accounts on Twitter and Instagram will have to sideline their theory that the masks would be used as a ransom device until your kids got the mRNA vaccine, which was just one step onto the conveyor belt of total tyranny, the end of which features Hillary Clinton wearing your vivisected child’s face as a party costume to Ghislaine Maxwell’s murder in prison. I mean “suicide by hanging.”
Luckily, war in Europe arrived to save everyone from confronting the depressing fact that they could have used the extra time at home the past two years to master a foreign language, lose all that weight, or master French home cooking but instead wasted it on social-media rabbit holes. Now the conspiracy theorists are telling us that they “failed with Covid,” but look at all the fake stuff coming out of Ukraine. They haven’t figured out the next bit, I gather.
Will Covid’s impairments of everyday life for the healthy ever come back? It’s an open question. Hochul and Adams both reserved the right to reimpose mask mandates and vax requirements if the numbers worsen. CDC director Rochelle Walensky described this period as a “break” — as if we’re all in a Covid jail and our captors are kindly allowing us some time un-manacled in the prison yard before returning to the hole.
One clue to look for: whether or not the progressive herd-think instinctively attacks Southern red states for the inevitable summer wave that we know is a regional and seasonal feature of this illness. Will we get the familiar, almost formulaic drumbeat in the media? Uh-oh, the Southern states are too loose, and there’s a new variant going around. Uh-oh, without examining any evidence, we’ll just ask a bunch of apocalyptic doctors whether they’re afraid that the new variant will finally bring death’s long scythe down on our toddlers. Turns out that a few of them are afraid. Headline: “Doctors Afraid the Pensacola Variant Will Ruin Your Baby’s Instagram Feed by Straight-Up Killing Him.”
I have a feeling that the need for economic recovery in the service sector is going to keep the masks and vax passports at bay. Already the airlines have been lobbying hard to get rid of restrictions. Countries that rely on American tourism are going to realize that a lot of us aren’t vaccinated, and they are going to drop their travel restrictions, too. At least, one hopes.
As for me, I’m working on our routes and reading manuals about flying an ultralight plane to Iceland just in case I need to escape the irradiated plume of dust that will shoot up from New York if the Putin regime gets too unstable. The masks are coming off my toddlers, and won’t they be excited when I tell them they have to get used to eating smoked eel now.