The pandemic is over, as far as the United States is concerned. The brief period during which we should be expected to tolerate continued restrictions on our freedom, and especially on our children, is coming to an end, too.
Nevertheless, summer camps across the country will needlessly require children to wear masks. Swimming pools will prohibit them from playing with their friends. Playgrounds will remain closed for no good reason.
Come fall, millions of students who want to be in the classroom five days a week will be barred, and many will have to wear masks, even outdoors.
Many private businesses still require masks outdoors or among vaccinated employees and clients. Far worse, hospitals continue to bar visitors. Many hospitals won’t let both parents be with a sick child at the same time and won’t let brothers, sisters, grandparents, clergy, or friends visit at all.
At this point, almost all closures, lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distancing rules are unnecessary cruelty. The main cause of these cruelly lingering rules is bureaucratic stubbornness at the government level.
If your left-wing bookstore in Cambridge wants to require masks until Kamala Harris’s inauguration, that’s its business, of course. It might even be good business: The target clientele might feel safer knowing that no “Neanderthals” who resent pointless government rules will be browsing the shelves.
But many mom-and-pop shops, neighborhood pools, and local summer camps are imposing draconian mandates because they get stale, conflicting, and overly cautious guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from their state health departments, and from their local health officers.
It’s time for the health authorities, who have enjoyed so much attention and power for the past 14 months, to make clear that it’s all over.
The authorities won’t want to surrender power. They will only do so if they are made to.
Recall how just a few weeks ago, President Joe Biden’s CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, promised “impending doom,” scolded lawmakers for sending children to summer camps, and was trying to convince America that infections wouldn’t fall significantly until July? None of that was grounded in facts or science but in politics. And so, it took politics to bring the administration around.
After the New York Times, the Atlantic, and a handful of prestige liberal publications, the pages read by Biden advisers and Chuck Schumer’s donors, eviscerated the bad administration guidance on masking, Biden hurriedly (though very belatedly) repealed the CDC’s groundless suggestion that vaccinated people continue to wear masks.
Now, people in all 50 states need to apply pressure to their local, state, and county governments: Unmask children, especially outdoors; abolish social distancing rules; open all houses of worship to full capacity; open all summer schools; and announce that all public schools will be fully open in fall. States may reserve the right to require masking in some indoor settings if cases rebound with cold weather in the fall. But this summer, with prevalence at record low numbers, there’s no excuse.
We are constantly told to “be patient.” Lots of people are still afraid of the virus despite being vaccinated and despite the shrinking number of cases. Others are still “processing” the past year.
But the source of much of the trauma, much of what we all need to “process,” has been the closures and lockdowns, not the virus itself. Girls and boys have been denied playgrounds, sports, school, and even friends. Single people, and especially the elderly, have been isolated. Parents, deprived of the web of community that makes parenting possible, have been worn down.
So, yes, people are impatient. They ought to be. They know the science and the data. They know the efficacy of the vaccines and the low rate of the virus’s spread. If there are others who still cannot accept reality, they still have no right to impose their superstitions on everyone else.
So please be impatient. Apply pressure to governments to say out loud what the science and data tell us: The pandemic is over. It’s time to restart life, and not at a distance, but up close.
