When will New York City’s insane COVID alarmism end?
According to health czar Ashwin Vasan, the city has now reached “medium” risk, per the Centers for Disease Control’s “community levels” metric. So he wants New Yorkers to exercise “greater caution” in the name of “slowing the spread” — and start wearing masks again indoors in public even if vaccinated.
Utter nonsense.
COVID deaths in the city are about as low as they’ve ever been, averaging four per day for the past four weeks, while hospitalizations average 46 a day. And both, per the data gathered by the city health authorities, are trending even lower.
Cases are ticking up slightly, but nowhere near the recent peak we saw with the first Omicron wave.
Also, the whole selling point of the CDC’s new metric was that it supposedly pays more attention to actual bad COVID outcomes than raw case numbers. So why all this concern over a modest rise in infections when ultra-low deaths and hospitalizations show the opposite?
Plus, the city hit these rock-bottom levels while constantly — and correctly — loosening restrictions. The idea that now we have to go back to DEFCON-3 is absurd.
Especially since all available data shows that mask mandates have no real effect on broad COVID outcomes, good or bad (and that even high levels of masking compliance don’t seem to do much).
And the city’s remaining rules make no sense. The mandates for masking toddlers and vaccination for private-sector workers are both deeply anti-science.
The former is meant to “protect” a group with close to zero risk for death from COVID. The latter has a mile-wide carveout for celebrities. And neither, on the data, has done a damn thing to slow or stop COVID.
The virus will be with us forever, but between vaccines, natural immunity, numerous therapeutics and its own inevitable evolution into less deadly forms, it’s no longer a major public-health threat.
Vasan should focus on making sure everyone who needs to gets vaccinated does and those who do get sick can access therapeutics, not trying to scare people with miniscule low risk of bad COVID outcomes into cowering again.
The Chicken Little lunacy does nothing except derail New York City’s comeback.