Meet the New Metric, Same as the Old Metric
Tying useless restrictions to any Covid metric is nonsensical. They don't work, just end them for good!
On Friday the CDC unveiled its new Covid guidance, highlighted by a dramatic shift on masking guidance in which the CDC is no longer recommending masking for 70% of the country.
It's funny that just over a week ago the CDC director was saying it was "too soon for a change" and Fauci was saying we would need to "inch our way back to normal".
Often throughout these two years when Public Health agencies would make these dramatic about faces you'd hear it said (tongue in cheek) that they, "must have gotten the memo". What's funny is in this case they actually did! You can read it for yourself:
(Images of the document are attached at the end of the post)
This memo, from an internal Democrat polling organization and titled "Taking the Win over Covid-19", explains how Democrats have been getting hammered in the polls for their Covid policy and lists off a 5 point plan for making a course correction, which can be summarized as:
Claim victory over Covid, and push for normalcy.
Take the side of people worn out by Covid measures.
Acknowledge that Covid is endemic.
Repudiate the Zero Covid non-sense.
Stop talking about restrictions.
This is a great plan, it sounds familiar... If the Democrats had come to me a few months back I bet I could have given this plan to them for much cheapers than the pollsters charged.
There's just one issue, and it's the opening sentence of the memo:
"After two years that necessitated lockdowns, travel bans, school closures, mask mandates,..."
That's the problem. There was no necessity for any of these measures. We should have known it then, but we certainly know it now! The lockdowns did not work. Border closures were an utter failure. School closures were a disaster. Masks do not work. But even if the politicians will now claim to be "taking our side" they aren't admitting to their policy failures, which risks them being repeated!
Which brings me back to the CDC's updated guidance. The CDC, after Following the Science (reading the polls), has updated their guidance by creating three new "Covid-19 Community Levels" and as long as your county isn't in the "High" level, the CDC doesn't recommend that you wear a mask.
They've thrown out there old case based metric and replaced it with one based on both cases and Covid hospitalization data:
It's a marked improvement on where they were before, but it still holds over society the potential that useless restrictions will return. And this is not just a theoretical concern. The CDC's new threshold levels are completely arbitrary, but they serve a purpose. They are tuned such that they justify much of CDC's policies to date, just look at community levels in January, a sea of orange:
But going forward it's a more moderate mixture and trending towards green:
The problem is that if our governments actually hold to this new CDC guidance, like they have held to what came before it, we can count on masks returning on a regular basis every winter.
Let's use the nearest large metro to me, Sacramento, California as an example:
Sacramento County, with a little over 1.5 million people, was above the 200 cases/100K pop threshold (about 450 cases/day) from Thanksgiving 2020 until the end of January 2021, then for much of August and September last summer (Delta), and from about Christmas until just last week (Omicron). To think we won't hit this number again later in 2022 is foolish, especially since Gavin's S.M.A.R.T.E.R. plan will keep us testing like mad.
Once you hit the case metric, the hospital numbers aren't out of the question either. The CDC's FluNet surveillance system shows that 10 weekly flu hospitalizations per 100K is a number we often hit during the peak of flu season. Shouldn't we expect this same level or more for Covid going forward?
Also we know these FluNet numbers are an underestimate, since the numbers only include confirmed cases of flu and prior to 2020 we didn't even regularly test every patient with flu like symptoms. If we keep to the practices of the last two years and test every admitted patient, not only will we capture every patient with Covid-like-illness, but we'll also be counting all the incidental Covid positive yet asymptomatic patients in the hospital for other reasons.
And look at that flu peak in January 2018. Pretty severe! Should we have been masking then? As severe as it looks it barely made the news and even if you worked in healthcare you probably have no memory of it...
The simple fact is community masking does not prevent Covid, and it certainly does not prevent Covid hospitalizations. For a perfect example, look at Los Angeles County, which has been the Mecca for masking and mask mandates (outside of the Super Bowl of course...)
Los Angeles county is still in the Orange "High" Level.
If masks help reduce Covid hospitalizations then why is LA Country still in the Orange?
If masks don't help reduce Covid hospitalizations then why are they mandated at all?
I'd ask the CDC director to explain this, but we know the answer would be some form of "Don't ask question, just Follow the Science"…
Many have been calling for the CDC to change their metrics away from cases towards hospitalizations and disease severity for some time, but this misses the point. Tying measures and restrictions which are useless at preventing Covid hospitalizations to a hospitalization metric is nonsensical.
It would make about as much sense for Gavin Newsom to attempt to end California's severe drought by mandating community rain dances, but assuring us the rain dance mandates would be lifted if we met certain weekly precipitation metrics...
Just ditch the metrics entirely. Let the CDC go down with the ship! Or as the Surgeon General of Florida would say, Buck the CDC!
If I could change one of the 5 points of the Democrats memo it would be the last point.
It shouldn't be: 5. Stop talking about restrictions
It should be: 5. Reject all future restrictions.
They don't work, just end them for good!
Anyway 0 and 2...
Here’s the full size images of the “Taking the Win Over Covid-19” Memo:
