As many Democratic states are planning to lift COVID mandates and rules regarding face coverings (FCs) while the rate of Omicron cases drops like a stone, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, is stone cold against the lifting of the mandates. She points our that contagion of COVID across the United States is still too high and that we haven't gotten to the point where FC mandates can be lifted.
It should be noted that most of the FC mandates about to be lifted don't get lifted until sometime next month - some of them very late in March. The seven-day average of COVID cases will likely be down even more by then, and the vaccination rate is still creeping up, bit by bit. In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy is lifting the public-school FC mandate, but not until March 7 - just over three weeks from now. He's looking at the same trends that Dr. Walensky must see, and with the state's vaccination rate higher than the national average, he's more than comfortable to go ahead with lifting the mandate. County and municipal governments will still be able to impose FC mandates if they feel that it is necessary. And, if it turns out that by March 7, Dr. Walensky is right and it's still too soon to lift FC mandates, Governor Murphy has plenty of time to extend the mandate for schools.
Maybe governors like Murphy and Kathy Hochul in New York would take Dr. Walensky's recommendations to heart if she did the one thing they've asked her to do - give them a set of benchmarks to follow to get their states out of the COVID emergency, All she and anyone else said in the Biden administration have said about that is that they're having meetings and discussing it - but she suddenly goes mum when pressed for details about just what they're discussing. A failure to communicate, of course, is nothing new for Rochelle Walensky, who, despite being the director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, has shown herself incapable of either of those tasks.
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