It was just a year ago in a CNN Town Hall event that President Joe Biden told the country, “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.” There was already good reason not to believe this at the time. But now Joe Biden is living proof. Four doses of the vaccine later, and he has it. But, again, it’s not serious. The White House is even putting out messages showing the president, unmasked, working away.

Yet people are begging for mandates and shutdowns to come back. San Diego schools have reimposed their mandates. So has the city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Some places never entirely shook off Covid mandates and may see a delay in long-promised liberations. Hawaii still has an effective school mask mandate that will expire for the first time on August 1.

In the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Nina Shapiro writes that she “knows better than most that there is bad news.” She is of course thrilled that the Department of Public Health is on course to reinstate the indoor mask mandate by the end of the month. “Just last week,” she reveals, “a friend commented to me that I must be happy that the mask mandate would be coming back. Yes and yes.”

She explains, “I obsessively check the daily data on cases, hospitalizations, deaths and positivity, and I expect those figures to improve if more people are masked more of the time.” But in fact it’s been obvious since the first Omicron variant that the seasonality of Covid outbreaks overwhelms and obscures all differences in public policy. New York State reimposed mask mandates ahead of the Omicron variant, and cases rose here just as precipitously as they did in neighboring states without mask mandates, such as New Hampshire.