President Biden continues to think that social distancing and masks will stay with us for the rest of the year. But even as he continues to be all over the place when discussing vaccines, it’s clear that our return to normal has already begun.
Biden suggested in his CNN town hall on Tuesday that social distancing and masks might continue into 2022. This tracks with what he told reporters last week, when he said, “You know that wearing this mask through the next year here can save lives.” The best Biden could promise during his town hall would be that we would be in “a very different circumstance, God willing,” by Christmas.
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But Biden’s pessimism is unwarranted and counterproductive. In that same town hall, he claimed that there would be enough vaccines available for every American to receive their two doses in late July. That means that, in the worst-case scenario, everyone who wants a vaccine will have received both doses by the beginning of October and be fully vaccinated over two months before Christmas.
Even that scenario doesn’t match the level of normalcy we are seeing across the country. Nearly 40 million people have received at least one dose of the vaccine, including 15 million that have been fully vaccinated. The number of new daily cases has been falling since mid-January. Most states have almost fully reopened and lifted stay-at-home orders. Twelve states have no mandatory mask orders in place.
Biden still doesn’t know what he’s doing when it comes to his coronavirus response. He set arbitrary 100-day goals of masking and vaccinations, which make for good sound bites and nothing more. He wants to include a minimum wage hike in the Democratic COVID-19 relief bill, kicking small businesses while they’re down after nearly a year of government-imposed lockdowns. He’s still dragging his feet on school reopenings due to the need to pander to teachers unions.
Our pre-pandemic normalcy is not far off on the horizon, sitting at Christmas or February 2022 as Biden seems to think it is. Many places are already there, and the areas that still have mask mandates and business restrictions will be following them shortly. If vaccines will be available for everyone by the end of the summer, then there ought to be no shutdowns or restrictions left by winter.
There will be no social distancing in 2022. Masks will be voluntarily worn by those few people who have taken them to be part of their identity for the last year. Our nationwide return to normal is well underway, whether Biden recognizes it or not.
