(2021-05-20) ZviM Covid 5/20 The Great Unmasking

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 5/20: The Great Unmasking. The CDC has lifted its mask mandate for vaccinated people. In one fell swoop, it is suddenly fine for anyone fully vaccinated to go maskless anywhere, without social distancing, at any time, so long as regulations and rules permit it. This retains the madness of ignoring partial vaccination entirely, and the madness of making children as young as two (!) wear masks around groups of fully vaccinated adults, but it is certainly a huge step towards sanity. There was also much confusion and opposition. Very Serious People expressed panic and horror. Others expressed reasonable concern that this was premature.

The opposition has some legitimate points. The control system could still have some fight in it. We have no way to verify verification status that anyone is willing to use. Vaccination checks are mostly going to be either non-existent or on the honor system, and America does not highly value honor.

At a minimum, this will change norms in ways that slow down the decline in cases. If everyone were to use this as a reason to go fully ‘back to normal’ at current vaccination rates cases would presumably start rising again at least for a while

A lot of people also pointed out the contradictions between this new policy and the old one, with the change from ‘take precautions that wouldn’t even make sense if you were unvaccinated’ to ‘once vaccinated take no precautions whatsoever’ coming overnight with zero warning, with little or no change in the underlying physical conditions.

Admitting one is wrong and correcting errors needs to be rewarded and encouraged rather than punished and piled onto.

Despite the risks, and it plausibly being slightly too soon (on the order of a few weeks) to do this full blast, I think this was absolutely the right move to make.

The Numbers

The Great Unmasking

If there was any doubt that changing CDC guidance would have a cascading effect on other guidance and on behavior, those doubts were put aside quickly. Many jurisdictions and private entities come in line with the new principles within days

What would we have gotten by waiting a few more weeks? We could have cut the remaining risk by something like half (until we started approaching some new equilibrium), and given everyone enough time to be fully vaccinated, with an additional three week delay. I don’t think that’s worth it for this reason, but plausibly could be in combination with concern #14. Here’s Zeynep, who is always thoughtful

The objection that some workers are immunocompromised is valid, but I don’t see this as anywhere near big enough to move the answer this much, especially considering there is nothing stopping employers from keeping their mandates. Mostly it seems to take the form of ‘we can’t do this because there’s a non-zero number of people who this makes unsafe’ with no attempt at a cost-benefit analysis

The Next Unmasking

We have begun restoring sanity and life to the adults, yet we remain sufficiently crazy that the children still need our help. Fauci is letting us know.

At this stage, it makes zero sense. The reason we don’t have the ability to vaccinate our youngest children is that we correctly realized it was not a priority to do so

It’s still true that an unvaccinated five year old is safer from Covid than a fully mRNA-vaccinated senior citizen, and it’s not remotely close

The evidence for spread in schools by underage students remains threadbare.

Lottery Provides Redeeming Social Value

the contrast between Ohio and other places is stark

In Other News

California offered schools $12 million dollars to reopen, so naturally San Francisco schools reopened for one day, claimed they’d earned the money, and then promptly closed again. On some level I’m not even mad I’m just impressed. I sure hope these institutions aren’t playing any iterated games or trying to build trust or act in the public interest, cause that would be super awkward.