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Masks were a justified temporary intervention before we had a highly effective COVID vaccine.
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Now, a large majority of the most vulnerable are vaccinated, making COVID much less deadly.
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The time to “get back to normal” is now – COVID is not going to go away, but we can manage it with vaccines.
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This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
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See more stories on the Insider business page.
I was not in Provincetown on July 4th.
I has been there for a few hours on July 2 – I spent the holiday weekend with my family nearby and went to Provincetown for a visit on a rainy day – and during that brief visit it seemed like everywhere I was going, I found homosexuals that I know from New York or California. The city was packed. And with the rainy weather, everyone could talk about the long lines to enter the already crowded bars.
After the weekend, it seemed like all people could talk about was how many people contracted COVID in Provincetown during the 4th. And now, sadly, you’re all talking about it. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s report on the Provincetown COVID cluster – 469 cases in Massachusetts residents, 76% of which were in vaccinated individuals – is one of the key pieces of evidence that led the agency to change. heading for Delta towards more alarm, especially for the vaccinated.
But the environment in Provincetown on July 4 was pretty much what you would have designed if you were trying to create the most efficient environment possible for spreading COVID to those vaccinated. If this is what happens when things go wrong with people who have been vaccinated, it is a great vaccine story.
As Andrew Sullivan described in his Friday newsletter, Provincetown is truly a town, not a town. But tens of thousands of people crowd there on the most intense summer weekends, partying in cramped little rooms with low ceilings and often poor ventilation. The weather on the 4th of July weekend was gloomy (57 degrees with rain during my brief visit) which made indoor venues both more popular and crowded than usual.
People kissed too, I was told.
And yet, despite all of this, the Provincetown cluster led to a total of seven hospitalizations and zero deaths, according to general manager Alex Morse. Case rates and positivity rates in the city are dropping. This is another demonstration that, for people who have been vaccinated, the best evidence we have is that COVID is really “just the flu” or even less severe than the flu – despite the fact that cases of rupture do occasionally occur.
The vaccinated have no moral obligation to save the unvaccinated from themselves
The main risk that remains in this pandemic concerns people who have chosen not to be vaccinated. I’m disappointed that the FDA has taken so long to approve vaccines for children under 12, but luckily COVID cases are disproportionately mild in children – only about 500 people under the age of 18 have died from COVID in the United States throughout the pandemic. And if adults want to take the risk of contracting COVID without a vaccine, it’s up to them.
But most of those most at risk for COVID have chosen to be vaccinated, including the 90% of seniors in the United States who have received at least one injection. The disproportionate vaccination of the most vulnerable is one reason the recent surge in COVID cases is not producing a proportional number of hospitalizations and deaths compared to previous waves – a trend we have seen in the UK, which has been affected by Delta before the United States.
I supported the masking rules before vaccines were widely available because they seemed to be one of the best tools we had. That said, they weren’t a very good tool – there’s a reason you need a statistical model to see the benefits produced by the mask rules, while the benefits of the vaccine are easily seen on a screen. map.
In most states, hospitalization rates remain well below the highest levels reached during the waves of last summer and last winter. As a result, in the vast majority of the country, the need to protect hospital capacity – one of the main justifications for restrictions imposed last year and early this year – is no reason to reintroduce distancing measures. social.
Some Southeastern states, notably Florida, are exceptions. But perversely, the return to mask warrants and other non-pharmaceutical interventions there is little political support and a lot more support in places that don’t need it, like the Northeast.
Bill de Blasio is right
The CDC has encouraged that even those vaccinated to resume wearing masks in indoor public places where there is “significant or high transmission” of COVID, a designation that currently applies to most of the country.
Washington, DC and Los Angeles County, among other municipalities, have turned those guidelines into a mandate, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo has urged localities in New York to do the same if the CDC guidelines apply to them, which ‘it does for New York City and some suburban counties. (Because the governor’s emergency powers related to COVID have lapsed, that decision now rests with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and other local officials, not Cuomo.)
During a press briefing on Monday, de Blasio stressed that the “overwhelming strategic axis” of his approach to tackle the new wave of COVID is vaccination because vaccines are from afar the most effective intervention available to us. He does not want to send the message that masks can substitute for vaccines. So while he encouraged vaccinated people to voluntarily mask themselves indoors when around unvaccinated people, he refused to impose a new requirement, saying it was not in line with city strategy. of putting vaccination at the center of the response.
And he wasn’t disheartened to point out that New York is back in business, with concerts and festivals and public art and all the in-person activities that make our city such a great place to gather. .
What de Blasio’s approach emphasizes is that non-pharmaceutical interventions are expensive. Closures and capacity limits are particularly costly, but mask warrants are also expensive, especially if you intend to enforce them – for the mandate to work, the city and the city’s private organizations would have to devote some time to it. significant workforce to enforce compliance.
A warrant would also undermine the “back to business” message that is important to getting New Yorkers back to work and school, and to fully reclaiming jobs and the city’s tax base. Getting back to normal is essential for the well-being not only of New York’s economy, but also of its people who have given up so much in the past 16 months, and the mayor is right to prioritize this.
My face is my business again
One of the unfortunate side effects of a deadly pandemic is that it proves busy stakes right on a lot of things and gives them good reason to harangue the rest of us. Fortunately, as this pandemic has become much less deadly in the United States, we can start to ignore busy people again. Sometimes busy people even ignore each other: DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, who imposed one of the mask warrants last weekend, didn’t wait 24 hours to rape it.
The problem with the new demands for the vaccinated to mask themselves is that the advantage of masks has greatly diminished with effective vaccines (a vaccinated person is much less likely to contract COVID and therefore much less likely to spread it) but the cost of the masking remains.
Masks are one of the factors that have inhibited our social interactions, depriving us of the ability to see each other. Mask rules are also likely to discourage business in restaurants, shops and airlines, prolonging the economic and jobs crisis. And all The intensification of social distancing rules is likely to give fuel to teachers’ unions and other activists who would seek to provide more than a full, in-person, five-day education to all students this fall. (Fortunately, the president said the right things on that last point.)
But there is also the question of personal freedom and the expansion of areas of behavior in which the curious feel free to interfere. My face is mine, and in the absence of a very good reason, you should mind your own business instead of telling me what to do with it. Highly effective vaccines have downgraded your reason for telling me the opposite of “really good”.
The new normal is here
From March of last year to roughly April, the history of COVID restrictions was clear: follow these rules now to protect yourself and avoid spreading the virus, and more of us will live until a later date when the activities will be safer and we can get back to normal.
There is nothing obvious any more that makes “later” safer than “now”. So if you’re talking about the need to change how society works to stop the spread of COVID, you’re basically talking about doing it indefinitely.
Whether it is a good idea to impose indefinite restrictions is not a question for “the experts”. They can only provide one part of the cost-benefit equation: the number of illnesses a given policy will generate. (And frequently, they were wrong, anyway.) It’s up to the rest of us to assess what indefinite restrictions we’re willing to endure to affect this outcome – just as we do with other risks we don’t fight from scratch, like car crashes. and alcohol-related death and heart disease and, yes, the flu.
People want to get back to the things they love. For some people, it’s partying in a sweaty basement in Provincetown where you could catch a cold or COVID. We had good reason to take that away from them last year. But now it’s time to let people take charge of their lives. Even though some of them might get sick.
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