Why not make it permanent? Since Muriel Bowser and her friends don’t need to comply with it, she might as well mandate it unto eternity for the proles and not have to worry about it anymore.
Short of brazenly flouting your own pandemic restrictions in full view of cameras, I can’t think of a better way to convince the public that the rules are arbitrary and needn’t be taken seriously than by decoupling them from the threat posed to the city by COVID. There’s no reason to forecast keeping them in place for three more months at a moment when the trajectory of the pandemic is uncertain.
And why peg mask rules to the trend in cases rather than the trend in hospitalizations? We know that a city with a high vaccination rate like D.C. can expect plenty of breakthrough infections from Delta but not as many hospitalizations or deaths as less vaccinated jurisdictions. Bowser and the CDC are using a dubious metric to justify keeping a mostly immunized population under restriction.
As D.C. enters its second week of a new mask mandate and the delta variant spreads, the number of people getting tested at pop-up testing sites has jumped. The number of new cases is rising daily, though, and the number of people getting vaccinated is stagnant, at about 1,000 people per day.
Patrick Ashley, a senior deputy director of the D.C. health department, said the mask mandate is likely to be in effect for weeks to come.
“We’re very hopeful that we’ll get back to normal around the holidays,” he said.
“We’re hopeful that by Thanksgiving we’ll be in a different spot, but that relies on people getting vaccinated,” Ashley added.
Here’s what Delta has done to Washington in terms of hospital capacity:
In mid-July, shortly before Bowser ordered the new indoor mask mandate, the city was averaging 56 hospitalizations for COVID. Today, 12 days after the mandate took effect, it’s averaging … 58.
Average deaths per day are 0.0. The last time Washington averaged as much as one death per day was May.
Gazing at those numbers, you might conclude that Bowser’s mask mandate is more a case of COVID “security theater” than a precaution designed to meaningfully reduce transmission. And you would be right. A surreal example of misplaced priorities cited yesterday by Robby Soave confirms it. There’s only one way to make indoor spaces in D.C. durably safe from infections that might send people to the hospital, and it ain’t masks. Yet, when the city was approached by local business owners with a proposal that would have incentivized that much more meaningful precaution, they were turned away.
[A] coalition of Washington, D.C., gym owners decided to approach the city with a bargain: They would require customers to be vaccinated if the city would grant them a waiver from the mask mandate.
This deal was a win-win and should have been a no-brainer for the city. The vaccines are a much, much more effective and enduring anti-coronavirus measure than the masks are. Getting people vaccinated is the whole point: No one should want to wear masks forever. If business owners would rather require vaccination than masks, then the government should absolutely let them do that.
So of course, the city said no.
Bowser should have leaped at that invitation. In fact, she should have proposed it herself when she announced the new mask mandate. If your business requires proof of vaccination for entry, your staff and customers are exempt from having to mask up. There’ll still be occasional infections among vaccinated people on the premises, but the more Washingtonians who get jabbed to comply with the new rules, the fewer infections citywide there’ll be. And of course vaccinated customers would be free to mask up anyway if they wanted a bit of extra protection beyond what their shots gave them.
Offered a choice between an invisible yet very effective precaution, vaccination, and a visible but much less effective one, masking, Bowser chose theater. Evidently, for her, it’s not about reducing the spread to the greatest possible extent in her city. It’s about displaying her authority and virtue-signaling that she cares by insisting that her constituents walk around masked up indoors, even if they’re vaccinated.
At least she’s starting to focus on the actual solution. Her office also announced a few hours ago that she’ll mandate vaccines for most D.C. municipal employees. It’s a start.
