The Ridiculous New Covid Panic

P resident Joe Biden, a man so obviously unsteady and frail that governors in his own party are starting to circle him like vultures, has Covid. Earlier this month, Dr. Anthony Fauci, an 81-year-old, also had Covid. Neither experienced even remotely serious symptoms.

So why can’t we move on?

It was just a year ago in a CNN Town Hall event that President Joe Biden told the country, “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.” There was already good reason not to believe this at the time. But now Joe Biden is living proof. Four doses of the vaccine later, and he has it. But, again, it’s not serious. The White House is even putting out messages showing the president, unmasked, working away.

Yet people are begging for mandates and shutdowns to come back. San Diego schools have reimposed their mandates. So has the city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Some places never entirely shook off Covid mandates and may see a delay in long-promised liberations. Hawaii still has an effective school mask mandate that will expire for the first time on August 1.

In the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Nina Shapiro writes that she “knows better than most that there is bad news.” She is of course thrilled that the Department of Public Health is on course to reinstate the indoor mask mandate by the end of the month. “Just last week,” she reveals, “a friend commented to me that I must be happy that the mask mandate would be coming back. Yes and yes.”

She explains, “I obsessively check the daily data on cases, hospitalizations, deaths and positivity, and I expect those figures to improve if more people are masked more of the time.” But in fact it’s been obvious since the first Omicron variant that the seasonality of Covid outbreaks overwhelms and obscures all differences in public policy. New York State reimposed mask mandates ahead of the Omicron variant, and cases rose here just as precipitously as they did in neighboring states without mask mandates, such as New Hampshire.

“The more we can do to stave off an increase in infections that could overwhelm hospitals, the healthier we all will be,” she writes. But most hospitals in the Los Angeles area have lots of excess capacity. The rule of thumb in hospitals is that an occupancy rate of 85 percent is normal. The 15 percent cushion exists to handle outbreaks or major accidents. Many hospitals in L.A. are closer to 60 percent of their capacity. And anecdotally it is turning out that, as with the Omicron variant before it, many people counted as Covid hospitalizations were admitted for something unrelated to Covid.

The majority of people in the United States are vaccinated. By April of this year, over 60 percent of Americans had been infected with Covid at least once and survived. Federal vaccine mandates failed to take hold earlier this year. Plans for school mandates for Covid-19 vaccines have been repeatedly delayed. But even still, immunologists feel comfortable telling the New York Times that perhaps 98 percent of Americans have some form of immunity to Covid-19.

The result of the pandemic for public health’s reputation and trust in our institutions has been horrific. Even by the end of last year, one of the doctors advising the White House had to admit that the cloth masks that most people wore to comply with the mask mandates were “little more than facial decorations.”

And yet, even at this late date, doctors and people who have made little careers as hypochondriacal pundits are still calling for the reimposition of broad, and broadly failing, public-health interventions.

If even Joe Biden is fine, chances are your kid will be just fine, too.