COVID is complicated.
"First, you say, you do
And then you don't
And then you say, you will
And then you won't
You're undecided now
So what are you gonna do?
Now you want to play
And then it's no
And when you say you'll stay
That's when you go
You're undecided now
So what are you gonna do?"
Undecided, made popular by Ella Fitzgerald, 1939
COVID is a moving target.
The CDC's reputation and credibility are sinking, and with it the credibility of officeholders attempting to do public health consistent with CDC guidance.
Credibility is a fragile thing. It is earned less from being objectively true than it is from being clear and consistent. "The vaccinated don't need masks anymore," is a simple rule.
Clear, simple guidance
The CDC had said vaccinated people could take off their masks, a great visible tangible reward for vaccination. Now, amid the delta variant, guidance changed; we should wear masks indoors around the potentially-unvaccinated, which means nearly everywhere indoors around strangers. The big unsaid, unintended message is that the CDC doesn't know what it is doing.
I am vaccinated. I got my hopes up. I have been mask-free for a few weeks. Now, apparently, the vaccine is good, but not perfect, and vaccinated people sometimes get COVID. Breakthrough COVID patients can spread COVID, so now to be a good, careful citizen, we need to mask up--mostly to protect the unvaccinated. I have a mental image of the unvaccinated and it is unkind and incomplete. I imagine the negligent person, the selfish risk-taker, and the Trump-supporting, Tucker-Carlson-watching resister, thinking darned if he will give Democrat Joe Biden the satisfaction of taking a dose of that unproven George Soros/Bill Gates mind-control drug.
I think to myself, "why bother" if I am protecting people who won't do their part. Then the CDC reminds us that some people do want the vaccine, but have auto-immune problems, that children under twelve aren't yet eligible and they can spread it, and that some of my community's most vulnerable people-- people with kidney transplants, for example--could get very sick and die if I, a vaccinated and possibly asymptomatic carrier, spread it to them.
So after experiencing freedom, we are supposed to climb back into our masks. I want to blame someone, and who better than the messenger, the CDC with its confusing, apparently-inconsistent guidance, and the governors and mayors who act on that guidance. First they say they do, and then they don't.
Every county is different
The new rules aren't simple, nor intuitive. Apparently my home in Jackson County Oregon, is a relative delta hotspot, shown in orange. The next county to the east, Klamath County (home of the Bootleg fire) has fewer COVID cases right now. I need to mask in a grocery store here, but I wouldn't in a Klamath County store. Klamath County is rural, agricultural Trump-country. The common attitude there toward masks, social distancing, and COVID generally is to ignore it and scoff. Yet, somehow, Jackson County people need to protect our mask-refusers, but people in Klamath County do not.
It just seems wrong. Unfair. Illogical.
Governments have police power to control epidemics. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the 1905 Supreme Court case, established that states can require vaccinations. COVID mitigation is proving to be an unpopular power to use. Democrats should have no illusion that voters in 2022 will thank them for successfully dealing with COVID. They won’t. Quite the opposite. The disease will not have disappeared. It is endemic. Moreover, the actions necessary to deal with it are doomed to feel like tyranny to the opponents of vaccination and mishandled and confusing to everyone else.
There is no good way out of this, which is why Trump was hoping for a miracle. He didn't get it and neither will Biden nor Democratic governors.