So Which Is It?

On Tuesday, Texas Gov Abbott and Mississippi Gov Reeves eliminated all state-mandated COVID restrictions within their states. President Biden promptly called them Neanderthals.

His earlier message was:

"When do I think things will get back to normal? I've been cautioned not to give an answer to that because we don't know for sure. But my hope is, by this time next year, we're going to be back to normal," Biden told reporters at the White House.

Dr Fauci disagreed.

“I don’t think we’re going to be completely normal a year from now,” Fauci said. “But I hope we’re well on the way to normality so that we can ultimately get the world protected at the same time as we get economic recovery so that all the unintended consequences of shutting down begin to normalize, including other health issues that have arisen because of the shutdown.”

Both Fauci and Biden are sorta-kinda in any case, leaving themselves plenty of room to move the goalposts as they choose.

Meanwhile, if policies begin to follow the data as it's emerging, the authorities will have little choice but to open up, however reluctantly. The Los Angeles County health department announced yesterday

L.A. County is very close to meeting the metric thresholds for the less restrictive red tier in the State's Blueprint for a Safety Economy. This week, L.A. County's adjusted case rate dropped to 7.2 new cases per 100,000 people and the test positivity rate is 3.5%. Our case rate needs to remain at or below 7 new cases per 100,000 residents for two consecutive weeks to move to the less restrictive red tier. If L.A. County moves into the red tier next week and stays in that tier for two consecutive weeks, schools will then be eligible to reopen in-person learning for students in grades 7 through 12.

However, the red tier is still highly restrictive.

The most significant difference between the purple and red tiers is that in the red tier, restaurants, museums and movie theaters can reopen indoors, at 25 percent capacity or 100 people — whichever is fewer. Gyms can reopen indoors at 10 percent capacity. (In the purple tier, all of those are allowed to operate outdoors only.)

Bars and breweries — businesses that serve alcohol but not food — must remain closed. In both the purple and red tiers, though, wineries can operate outdoors only.

It took the US Supreme Court to force California to allow churches the same operating conditions as big-box stores in the purple tier.

The problem for authorities that want to continue highly restrictive COVID controls will be that the data hasn't supported such controls. The statistics spiked in late 2020, even when Californians had near 100% compliance -- and when they were allowed to come back inside churches, they in fact peaked and declined. There was no new post-holiday surge -- the peak came in early January, when by normal assumptions, an even bigger post-New Year surge would have shown up a few days after that.

I think at this point that the received COVID narrative is on shaky ground. Yesterday I quoted an article where an epidemiologist wasn't sure what's caused the sudden decline in COVID statistics -- the part he didn't mention is that nobody's sure what drove the surge, either.