More COVID Contrasts

It's starting to look like vaccines, no matter how indifferently distributed, are the magic bullet that will solve COVID. But so far, governments to one degree or another are becoming disappointed that this is the case. I saw reports of a mass demonstration in London last Saturday:

Videos posted to social media showed streets jammed with mostly maskless protestors. One marcher carried a sign reading “They did not isolate a virus. They isolated you.” Others said “No to vaccine passports” and “Lockdowns kill”.

Some reports put the crowd size at 10,000.

Lockdown measures have already started to lift in the UK with restaurants and pubs given the greenlight for outdoor eating and drinking on April 12. Gyms and hair salons were also permitted to open and further restrictions are set to be lifted May 17 at the earliest.

Curious, I went to see the UK's COVID chart. To my surprise, it looks a great deal like California's, which is the best in the US. But California continues to have fairly stringent controls, which themselves contrast to many US states, where controls of any sort, including mask mandates, have been lifted entirely. Even so, in California, most counties have reached the "orange" tier, which allows things like 50% indoor dining and outdoor drinking in bars. Depending on the county, these have been in effect for weeks.

And this is in one of the strictest US COVID regimes. In Texas, the lockdown is yeasterday's issue. So far, COVID passports haven't been raised as a serious option in the US. UK media seems stumped that citizens, like Oliver Twist, seem to be asking for more. How ungrateful they are for what the government has already granted them!

But even in the US, Dr Fauci has been slow-walking relaxations that even he acknowledges are common sense:

Face masks have taken an increasingly central role in debate lately as many have questioned the continued and widespread use of masks even as vaccinations continue to soar nationwide. A Georgia mother went viral this week after she sounded off on her local school board continuing its mask mandate through next year.

. . . "What I believe you’re going to be hearing, what the country is going to be hearing soon, is updated guidelines from the CDC," Fauci told ABC News' "This Week." "The CDC is a science-based organization. They don’t want to make any guidelines unless they look at the data and the data backs it up."

"But when you look around at the common sense situation, the risk is really low, especially if you’re vaccinated," he said.

I can only be happy that the US political culture is driving reopenings much more forcefully than in most of the world.