Panic Dissipating?

There's been a stir about yesterday's updated CDC mask guidelines, but I think the takeaway is that they're largely semantic and at this point, without tattoos on people's foreheads showing their vaccine status, completely unenforceable, even by the most zealous Karens. With the chart above in mind, let's say an unvaccinated person decides to eat at an outdoor restaurant without a mask. Since there's no requirement that he wear a lanyard with his vaccine slip in a clear plastic holder, there's no way anyone can check if he's fully vaccinated or not and thus permitted to go maskless.

Even it a Karen has her suspicions, if she confronts him in a huff, the unvax can simply huff back at her to mind her own business, and the other patrons more likely than not will shout her down as well. But the relaxation overall is pretty pusillanimous, and it's actually based on nothing new. At least in LA County, it was always OK to go jogging or bike riding without a mask. Beyond that, Dr Fauci has in effect been acknowledging that this whole mask thing has never been common sense, even when he said it was:

The CDC guidelines allow people who have been fully vaccinated (defined as being at least two weeks removed from their last shot) to do things such as walk, bike or eat at an outdoor restaurant without masks. Pretty much everything except congregating in large groups of strangers is considered safe, and even then, a mask should protect you, according to the guidelines.

“You can do so many of the things that are common-sense things,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told WTOP.

But depending on the state they lived in, people could do all these things without the shot, and still can, with infection statistics generally better than in states where they couldn't. And for Dr Fauci, common sense is how he feels at the moment anyhow. Last January, he was saying it was common sense to wear not one mask, but two:

During an interview with Savannah Guthrie on NBC’s TODAY earlier this week, he was asked for his thoughts on if wearing two masks would make a difference.

“It likely does because this is a physical covering to prevent droplets and virus to get in,” Dr. Fauci told Guthrie. “So if you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective. That’s the reason why you see people either double masking or doing a version of an N95.”

So by January's standards, if you're vaccinated, you're obviously still safer if you wear a mask, so why not keep wearing one? Indeed, why not keep wearing two? It's pretty clearly a case of what will keep Fauci on the Sunday talks, which I think this sequence shows. He knows what he can get away with, even with Savannah Guthrie.

But there are other signs that the mood is improving. After the Chauvin verdict, despite several new well-publicized officer involved shootings, the riots haven't resumed -- and there was some justified fear that the riots would resume whatever the verdict. And the precipitous decline in Oscar viewership shows the public is increasingly tired of woke. This has been carrying over to big-league sports as well.

We aren't dealing witbh epidemiological issues here. The COVID crisis was never the Black Death nor ebola, neither polio nor yellow fever. With an estimate of 5 million deaths worldwide that I saw recently, it's about 10% the size of the 1918 Spanish flu, with an estimate of 50 million. But short of vaccine, public health efforts to curb COVID via masks and lockowns have been feckless, and we're seeing little insight so far into how the disease actually spread.

The problem has been one of moral panic, not public health.