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New US COVID-19 cases are a quarter what they were six weeks ago, with the daily numbers dropping 15 percent to 25 percent a week. It’s time for the country to start moving rapidly to normalcy — restoring jobs and restoring lives. Caution is still in order, but only that.
Yet President Biden, after vowing the nation will have enough vaccine doses by July’s end to vaccinate every American, just said he only hopes for a return to normal by “next Christmas.” Huh?
“I don’t want to overpromise anything here,” “A year from now,” he told CNN, “I think that there’ll be significantly fewer people having to be socially distanced, having to wear a mask.” That’s not avoiding overpromising, as he claimed: It’s outright telling everyone to expect yet another year of economic and social devastation.
Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, says the worst of the pandemic “might be” behind us. Yet he’s also telling Americans they’ll need to wear masks (maybe two at a time) at least through 2022 — even if they get vaccinated.
This is absurd: Our leaders should be nonstop pushing reluctant Americans to get jabbed so we can all get on with our lives.
Some point to variants — from Britain, South Africa, Brazil and now New York — as new reason for great concern. But though some of these strains have proven more contagious, none has proven more deadly.
Hospitalizations and deaths keep dropping, even as variants have gained ground: Deaths dropped 20 percent these last two weeks. The UK variant predominates in Britain, Switzerland, Denmark and Israel — and all are also seeing cases dive.
And the drug companies that (thanks to President Donald Trump ripping up red tape) developed life-saving vaccines at lightning speed are already testing updated versions that target the variants, though their “classic vax” still offers high protection against them.
And while America’s vaccination process has rolled out more slowly than it should’ve, it’s still moving inexorably along.
More than 13 percent of Americans have gotten at least one dose, and the majority are health-care workers or those in nursing homes or other high-risk settings.
Add to that the number of us estimated to have already been infected — 35 percent of Los Angeles County and more than half of Miami-Dade County, for example — and you can see why Johns Hopkins prof Marty Makary predicts we’ll have herd immunity by April.
And the most at-risk Americans have gained immunity. Data scientist Youyang Gu estimates that the number of “susceptible” Americans, those over 45 without immunity, has fallen from a third of the country at the start of the year to 10 percent or fewer now.
Cases in nursing homes fell more than 80 percent from late December to early February. When deaths spiked over the holidays, they actually fell at nursing homes.
But it’s the youngest Americans — least at risk of transmitting the virus or suffering badly from it — who must get their lives back immediately. At least 38,000 New York City teachers have been vaccinated, according to City Hall and the United Federation of Teachers.
Perhaps it’s just that normalcy makes it too hard to justify the rush to pass a $1.9 trillion “relief” bill filled with Democrats’ pet projects. We’d rather not think cynical politics is behind Biden’s gloom, but it’s hard to see any other reason he’s denying that the pandemic’s end is staring us in the face.
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