It’s hard not to feel a sense of deja vu.
As headlines blare about the delta variant of COVID-19, areas across the country—including Washington, D.C.; Louisiana; and three regions of California—have launched new mask mandates.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, demonstrating its now well-known penchant for delivering absolutist statements in quick succession that contradict each other, went from saying vaccinated people didn’t need to wear masks to recommending masks in certain circumstances.
Is it March 2020 all over again?
Back then, we didn’t know how deadly (or not) COVID-19 was. We weren’t sure how it was transmitted. We weren’t clear who was most at risk. We didn’t know how many would require hospitalization or what kind of care they would need. We didn’t have much knowledge about the efficacy of mask mandates in nonmedical settings.
And we didn’t have the vaccines.
In other words, we’re in a whole different world now.
Ninety percent of seniors, the Americans at greatest risk for death or hospitalization from COVID-19, have had at least one COVID-19 vaccine shot. (About 80% of seniors are fully immunized.) The vaccine is now available to all adult Americans at easily accessible locations across the nation.
And the vaccines are working.
Virtually no one who has been vaccinated is getting hospitalized or dying. “The hospitalization rate among fully vaccinated people with COVID-19 ranged from effectively zero (0.00%) in California, Delaware, D.C., Indiana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Vermont, and Virginia to 0.06% in Arkansas,” reports the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on health care.
“The rates of death among fully vaccinated people with COVID-19 were even lower, effectively zero (0.00%) in all but two reporting states, Arkansas and Michigan, where they were 0.01%,” the foundation added.
Yes, some vaccinated Americans are still getting COVID-19. But the goal wasn’t to guarantee that no one ever became sick again. It was to ensure we didn’t end up in some apocalyptic scenario where crammed hospitals had no bandwidth to care for additional patients, or where people died due to lack of care and supplies.
With half of adult Americans now being fully immunized, that means we’ve effectively halved the at-risk population. (Indeed, given how many seniors are vaccinated, we’ve probably more than halved it.) We’re simply not talking about the same numbers we were in 2020.
That reality is reflected in the hospital data. “According to the Department of Health and Human Services, of the nation’s more than 919,500 hospital beds, COVID-19-associated hospital admissions totaled just 944 on July 24,” wrote my Heritage Foundation colleague Doug Badger in a recent op-ed for The Daily Signal. “That compares with 6,679 such hospital admissions in early January.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Furthermore, since March 2020, we’ve finally gotten some data about mask mandates. Frankly, they don’t seem to deliver results. In a December Heritage Foundation report, Badger and another Heritage Foundation colleague, Norbert Michel, write, “During the U.S. [COVID-19] surge in the fall, 97 of the 100 counties with the most confirmed cases had either a county-level mask mandate, a state-level mandate, or both.”
Which brings us to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s unique approach to the resurgence of COVID-19 cases. De Blasio, while recommending mask-wearing indoors in public places, didn’t issue a mask mandate.
Instead, he said that all restaurants, gyms, and theaters would be required to check vaccination status and only admit those who had been vaccinated.
On the one hand, de Blasio has science on his side: Unlike mask mandates, vaccinations have proven to be highly effective.
But on the other hand … this is outrageous and inappropriate control by the government. A private business shouldn’t be forced by the government to become the Vaccine Police.
Before the vaccine, we were in a unique public health situation, where our actions affected each other. Now, with the vaccine, we have a true element of personal choice. People can choose to take the vaccine and almost certainly avoid hospitalization or death. Or they can choose to accept an element of risk and not take the vaccine.
Given that liberal lawmakers seem to think “my body, my choice” is the most sacred right of all, you’d think they’d recognize the importance of allowing Americans to make their own decisions about their health.
Instead, in his quest to pressure New Yorkers to get vaccinated, de Blasio is putting another unfair burden on New York City businesses—which have already struggled horribly during the pandemic. At least 1,000 restaurants have closed in the Big Apple since the beginning of the pandemic, according to Eater New York.
“I didn’t know I had a second job as a police officer,” Edward Gomez, who owns four restaurants on Staten Island, told the Staten Island Advance about the vaccine passports. “It’s challenging enough to own a small business as is.”
Roseann Camarda, who owns three fitness studios, told the Advance, “This is just another knock to our business.”
“We are already financially struggling from the amount of time de Blasio had fitness centers closed,” Camarda said, adding, “I don’t feel I have the right to turn someone away for their medical decision.”
Meanwhile, the surge of business closings is hurting New Yorkers. The unemployment rate in the city is currently 10.6%, according to the New York Department of Labor.
And some of the hardest-hit sectors are those de Blasio is targeting. “Employment in hotels and restaurants is about 150,000 lower than it was before the pandemic, while the number of jobs in the performing arts is down about 40,000,” The New York Times reported in June.
Furthermore, there’s a danger these “vaccine passports” will catch on further, hurting small businesses and unemployed Americans in other cities. In Chicago, the commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, Allison Arwady, said she was “interested” in what New York was doing, according to the local NBC affiliate.
What is going on?
We are simply not in the same kind of public health crisis we were back at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s time for lawmakers and officials to wake up and realize that.
Individual Americans, not government officials and lawmakers, should decide how they want to handle COVID-19. And we should all be spared from onerous mask mandates and vaccine passport requirements.
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