Perhaps the tiny crevices are appearing through which the grass of freedom can push through and ultimately demolish the concrete layer of panicdemic oppression. In Washington, D.C., whose local government is about as far from libertarian as one can find outside of the Chinese mainland –
Washington’s local mask mandate, one of the strictest in the nation since late July, will relax greatly beginning Monday, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced Tuesday.
The District had required residents to wear masks in most indoor settings since the delta variant caused coronavirus case counts to rise over the summer. On Tuesday, though, Bowser said coronavirus vaccinations are working: While case rates remain far above the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommended target of 50 new cases per day for every 100,000 residents, Bowser noted that vaccines are preventing most people who catch the virus from needing hospitalization.
That means it’s time to let residents choose whether to wear masks in their office buildings, retail stores, gyms and many other settings, Bowser said. Businesses can still require masks, but it will not be legally mandated – and some hope the change will help retailers struggling in a downtown that still resembles a ghost town most days.
Perhaps indicative of the motivation for this liberalization is a bracketed note that the online version of this story inserts immediately after the preceding paragraphs: “[Bowser is running for a third term as D.C. mayor]”.
A more ambiguous sign, but I draw hope from it, is the latest pronunciamento by America’s most famous celebrity doctor. As reported in the zealously pro-panic Guardian –
Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases public official in the US, said on Tuesday that if America further ramps up vaccination rates and those already immunized take booster shots that it is feasible Covid-19 could be reduced from a pandemic emergency to endemic status next year.
More than 70% of adults in the US are fully vaccinated. Fauci said if a lot more Americans take the vaccines, and if the US makes boosters available for everyone, the country could get control of the virus by spring of 2022.
It sounds to me like Dr. Falsi perceives the unrest among hoi polloi and hopes to appease it by promising liberation – someday.
“To me, if you want to get to endemic, you have got to get the level of infection so low that it does not have an impact on society, on your life, on your economy,” Fauci said.
“People will still get infected. People might still get hospitalized, but the level would be so low that we don’t think about it all the time and it doesn’t influence what we do.”
But at this point most of the “impact on society, on your life, on the economy” stems not from the disease itself but from the restrictions placed on society, lives and the economy in the name of containing it.
Update (December 30, 2021): The concrete gets a new and thicker layer. Mayor Bowser has reverted to full panicdemic mode, complete with vaccine passports, an indoor mask mandate and a transition to “virtual” classrooms.
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