Who’s going to tell him that most red states shifted to an “endemic COVID” approach a year ago?

I suppose Newsom would say that doesn’t count because red states never had a “pandemic COVID” approach to begin with, at least not since spring 2020. And his “endemic COVID” strategy is in fact a strategy to detect and contain future outbreaks before they get rolling, not a simple matter of lifting all mandates and inviting people to behave as though the virus doesn’t exist.

Either way, let’s call it progress towards normalcy that the biggest, bluest state in the union has effectively declared the pandemic over even though Newsom has resisted phrasing it that way.

California’s plan, he said, shifts from a “crisis mentality” to emphasize prevention and adaptability, allowing officials to step up measures to detect and contain fresh outbreaks, as well as to look out for new variants. It also includes more public campaigns against misinformation and the stockpiling of tests and equipment rather than mask mandates and business shutdowns.

Newsom’s “Smarter” plan (standing for shots, masks, awareness, readiness, testing, education and Rx) includes maintaining a store of 75 million masks, increasing vaccination and daily testing numbers, monitoring wastewater for virus remnants, and responding to surges in cases by quickly bringing in extra medical workers via contracts with national staffing companies…

“This pandemic won’t have a defined end. There’s no finish line,” Newsom said at Thursday’s announcement. “There is no end date.”

It’s a surveillance and “rapid response” plan, essentially. California health authorities will look for upticks of virus in community wastewater, test to see if a new variant is responsible, and then quickly figure out whether existing vaccines or therapeutics work against it. The state aims to provide 200,000 vaccinations and 500,000 daily tests in the event of a new outbreak as well as 3,000 extra medical workers to hard-hit areas.

There’s a fancy acronym and everything:

#California has led the nation’s fight against the #COVID19 pandemic with early public health measures that saved lives. The SMARTER plan will prepare us for the next COVID-19 threat and help us respond to future public health emergencies.

Learn more at https://t.co/ccYS4iUkYO pic.twitter.com/0ARrnu6EDh

— California DMHC (@CADMHC) February 19, 2022

Newsom lifted California’s indoor mask mandate on Wednesday and will soon announce when the state’s school mask mandate will end. But “there will be no immediate lifting of the dozens of remaining executive emergency orders that have helped run the state since Newsom imposed the nation’s first statewide stay-home order in March 2020,” per the AP. Which makes it sound like “endemic COVID” will be a forever emergency justifying expanded executive powers in perpetuity.

As for why Newsom chose this moment to declare endemicity, here’s what California’s case curve looks like. If not now, when?

Three-quarters of Californians aged five and older are vaccinated and a sizable chunk of the remaining quarter has presumably been exposed to the virus by now. Post-Omicron, they’re as close to herd immunity as they’re going to get.

Newsom wasn’t the only Democratic governor to relax restrictions this past week. Jay Inslee announced that mask mandates in most indoor settings, including schools, will no longer be mandatory next month in Washington, the state where America’s COVID epidemic began. The White House is planning some sort of shift too, according to the Daily Beast, even though they’re at the mercy of Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky. Biden’s campaign pledge to always follow “the science” — i.e. whatever Fauci and Walensky happen to think on a given day — means he can’t push hard towards normalcy until they give him the all-clear. But his team is reportedly preparing:

After more than a year of false starts and premature promises that the coronavirus pandemic was nearing its end, the White House is close to announcing a “roadmap to normalcy,” according to public health experts who are helping draft the plan…

Sources familiar with the CDC’s discussions about potentially remodeling its COVID-19 guidelines told The Daily Beast that the agency is likely to rely more on measures of severity than on raw transmission and positivity rates—things like hospitalization rates, capacity in medical facilities, and death rates—to inform its guidances.

In addition to changing the metrics to more accurately reflect the comparably lower danger of viral spread within more-vaccinated populations, such a shift would also effectively justify the liberalization of COVID mandates already underway in many states.

Soon the only political entity still battling to keep mandates intact will be, uhhh, the civil-liberties lobby.

Here’s a bit from Newsom’s presser on Thursday. For such a big and dense state, California has done surprisingly well at holding down cases and deaths. As of this morning, they rank 39th out of 50 in cases per million residents and 38th in deaths per million. What sort of human toll they incurred by keeping public schools closed for months won’t be known for years.

Governor Gavin Newsom has announced California's shift to the "endemic" phase of the coronavirus pandemic, in which the state will shift focus to preventing future outbreaks. pic.twitter.com/hbKGmMnlIr

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) February 18, 2022