On the menu today: Tuesday brought another example of President Biden telling reporters his policy is “X,” only for the administration to later clarify that his policy is “not X,” demonstrating yet again that the country is led by a commander in chief who does not speak for his own administration. Meanwhile, the country is down to just a few institutions that still require masks, and the New York Times realizes that China’s official statistics on the Covid-19 pandemic don’t make any sense.
Will Someone Please Tell Joe Biden What His Actual Policies Are?
Let us begin by observing that, once again, what President Biden says his policy is does not turn out to be the actual White House policy.
From the account of Sebastian Smith, White House correspondent of Agence France-Presse, who was the White House pool reporter for Biden’s trip to New Hampshire yesterday:
Motorcade arrived at New HampshirePort Authority at Portsmouth Harbor at 2:01 pm. This is a windswept facility alongside a bridge and featuring a lot of orange trucks.
A handful of folks outside the entrance of the facility waved signs including but not limited to: “Trump won” and “Let’s go Brandon.” A man yelled “take your mask off” though it wasn’t clear whom he was addressing as the president had long passed.
POTUS is getting a briefing in infrastructure ahead of giving remarks.
As he passed by pool, he was asked if Americans should be wearing masks. He replied: it’s “up to them.”
Then, later that day:
The Justice Department announced on Tuesday that it will appeal a federal judge’s ruling that overturned the Biden administration’s mask mandate for air travel and public transport.
If the administration is seeking to reinstitute the mask mandate on air travel and public transportation, then the decision to wear a mask isn’t “up to them” as Biden said. It would be nice if the president’s morning briefings could offer him updates on what he thinks on issues like this.
Perhaps when Biden said it’s “up to them,” he was merely “speaking from the heart” again, which is the White House communications-staff code for “Grandpa is confused. Don’t pay any attention to him. What he said doesn’t mean anything.”
The Last Outposts of the Mask Mandate
Last weekend, I was in D.C.’s Southwest waterfront neighborhood and was about to enter the local Politics and Prose bookstore, when a sign on the door window stated that it required all customers to wear masks.
The store said it reinstated the requirement of masks for customers because “the CDC has changed DC’s Covid-19 Community Level rating from Green/Low to Yellow/Medium reflecting an uptick in Covid-19 cases in Washington, DC.”
There is indeed an uptick, but it looks particularly mild compared to the rest of this year. First, some perspective: The District of Columbia’s population is 718,000 or so, and that doesn’t count the visiting tourists and the roughly 480,000 people who commute in from the suburbs each weekday. That means, without tourists, about 1.2 million people are in the city each weekday; weekends bring fewer commuters but more visitors in for day trips, museums, the cherry blossoms, etc.
The daily average of new cases in the District has increased from 60 per day in late March to 222 per day now. As of last week, an average of 69 people were hospitalized with Covid-19; for perspective, that figure peaked at 850 hospitalized Covid-19 patients back in early January. The city currently averages one Covid-19 death every five days.
Back on March 1, the District stopped requiring masks in restaurants and bars, sports and entertainment venues, gyms, houses of worship, businesses, grocery stores, retail establishments, and city-government offices. But businesses that wished to continue their mask mandates were free to do so.
Around the waterfront, I’d say a small but noticeable minority of people chose to wear masks.
Even though I browse just about every bookstore I encounter, I chose not to enter Politics and Prose. The store offers masks, but I just didn’t want to bother. Just across the Potomac River in Virginia, plenty of bookstores are fine with customers browsing without masks.
Every store employee in the country has had ample opportunity to get vaccinated and boosted, and they are free to wear masks themselves. I’m vaccinated, boosted, and have had Covid-19. My body’s got as much protection against Covid as it’s going to get. I’ve been shopping without a mask for a long while now — spring 2021? At this point, putting on a mask feels like catering to someone else’s hypochondria. As of two weeks ago, shopping in Politics and Prose without a mask was safe. Very little has changed in the case numbers.
The proprietors are free to have the store mask policy that they prefer, and I’m free to shop elsewhere. Considering my severely limited ability to resist the temptation to buy a book when I’m in a store, the store’s masking policy probably cost it a sale — and I suspect the proprietors are just fine with that. They’re willing to lose certain customers in exchange for feeling the assurance of a mandatory masking policy. Hey, it’s a free country.
But I would note that since the Omicron wave peaked in mid January and ended in early March, Americans have witnessed and participated in big gatherings at NBA, NHL, college basketball games, Mardi Gras, Saint Patrick’s Day parades, concert festivals like Coachella, and weekly religious services. At the Oscars, people were more frightened of Will Smith than of catching Covid-19. You notice that you haven’t heard about those events being “experiments in human sacrifice,” as The Atlantic magazine famously characterized the state of Georgia when it allowed barbershops to reopen.
Few of those events have turned into super-spreaders, although it appears the Gridiron Dinner in Washington did indeed spread the virus around. But as far as we know, everyone there was vaccinated — and considering the health consciousness of Washington elites, they were likely boosted at least once, perhaps more than once — and people recovered. A Covid-19 outbreak among people who are vaccinated and boosted, and/or who have natural immunity from a previous infection, is not a life-threatening matter. Maybe the calculation changes if a person is elderly, immunocompromised, or has some serious comorbidities. Those who fit into those categories will have to make their own decisions on how much risk they are willing to accept. (As we have all learned over the past few years, isolation brings its own threats to good health.)
It’s an exaggeration to say everyone’s caught Covid-19 by now. But a lot of us have. According to the CDC, about 80.5 million Americans have had it; Worldometers puts the total at a bit more than 82.4 million Americans. Because not everyone goes to a doctor if they test positive at home, those numbers are undercounts. And now, more than 82 percent of Americans over the age of five have at least one shot of a Covid vaccine.
Why is Omicron not spreading like wildfire the way it did in January? Because “everybody” already caught it this winter and now has antibodies to fight it off. The virus has fewer and fewer places to go.
As always, if you want to wear a mask, you can. But it was never reasonable to expect your fellow citizens to wear masks for years and years.
As the Omicron wave passed, and as society opened and took off the masks again, some institutions are destined to be the last holdouts. We’re all getting a lesson in which level of government has authority over which institution. The Federal Aviation Administration controls airports and airplanes, but Philadelphia International Airport is keeping its mask mandate because of a local ordinance. New York City’s subways, buses, and commuter rail are keeping the mask mandates.
But those places are already outliers in the daily life of Americans. And Americans who are fed up with masks, and who have the option of avoiding them, will seek out alternatives. It makes no sense that it is safe to travel without a mask in certain large airports and not in others, or on New Jersey Transit but not on New York City subways.
New York Times: Hey, China’s Covid-19 Figures Seem Oddly Low
China typically classifies Covid-related deaths more narrowly than many other countries, labeling some chronically ill patients who die while infected as victims of those other conditions.
It may never become clear how many similar stories there are. China does not release information on excess deaths, defined as the number of deaths — from Covid as well as other causes — exceeding the expected total in a given period. Public health scholars say that figure more accurately captures losses during the pandemic, as countries define Covid-related deaths differently. . . .
The outbreak there has revived questions about the true toll of Covid in China, which has officially reported fewer than 5,000 deaths from the coronavirus in two years. . . .
When the Omicron variant started coursing through Shanghai in March, some looked, with trepidation, at the example of Hong Kong. The curve of Shanghai’s infections was closely tracking that of Hong Kong’s own huge outbreak. Both cities have large older populations, many not fully vaccinated. Hong Kong’s Covid death rate had soon become the world’s highest, with around 9,000 fatalities.
But a month later, Shanghai — more than three times as populous as Hong Kong — has recorded only 17 Covid deaths.
No shinola, Sherlock.
Sometimes, I cannot believe the grief I took for arguing that the Chinese figures on Covid-19 deaths were insanely implausible. There are some people who are extremely emotionally invested in the perspective that the Chinese government is a sharp-elbowed but ruthlessly effective alternative to the West, and offers a stark contrast to the messy, disorganized, fractious, or even chaotic United States. We’ve got our problems, but the Chinese self-image is largely a myth; the regime combines sadistic brutality with incompetence, a “CYA” attitude, and chronic, perpetual, ubiquitous, brazen dishonesty.
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