Also of the scant 40 million people remaining in California, who haven't yet moved to Texas or Florida, public support for at least some "COVID protocols" are very high [1]. I'm not sure you are giving an impartial assessment of the facts.
1: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-02-24/californ...
Leaked memo https://punchbowl.news/impact-covid-positioning-strategy-mem...
What should they have done?
That's fine, that's how democracy works. But it erodes trust in the political bodies that made all these rules and then just overturn them on a whim.
https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboards
https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater
I actually don't think the numbers will rebound; once everyone is protected from delta+omicron that does _not_ mean a new variant can keep appearing forever. It has to be different from both of them for immune escape, and that gets harder each time.
Also, we have antivirals now (paxlovid) which we didn't have even a month ago and are very effective.
Secondly, countless times we have seen a negative correlation between restrictions and case/death counts.
But I don't doubt that both parties factor PR into all of their decisions, down to how they dress.
The implication that a PR firm could dictate that the country would remain shut down until November despite covid numbers this low is silly. But I'm sure timing and messaging and other details are informed by PR studies.
Whether from fear of losing their jobs or wanting to carry out the will of their constituents, lawmakers have to pay attention to what we think either way.
Thinking PR doesn't dictate politics is what is really silly. If PR didn't matter, we wouldn't be inundated with ridiculous propaganda 24/7. They aren't "paying attention" to us, they are manufacturing consent and telling you what to think through all forms of media.
Now, how long until this gets censored?
The message is backed by advice from Biden’s polling firm, Impact Research, which studied voter attitudes to Covid and found that most Americans are "worn out" by the restrictions and "have personally moved out of crisis mode."
In a Feb. 16 memo, the firm told Democrats to take "the win" on Covid, warning that by 49 percent to 24 percent, Americans are more concerned about it causing economic harm than infecting them or a family member, and that far more parents and teachers worry about learning loss than illness for their kids.
"The more we talk about the threat of COVID and onerously restrict people’s lives because of it, the more we turn them against us and show them we’re out of touch with their daily realities," Impact Research’s Molly Murphy and Brian Stryker wrote in the memo, which was viewed by NBC News. They warned that if Democrats continue to emphasize Covid precautions over learning to live in a world with the virus, "they risk paying dearly for it in November."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/democrats-tur...
- for many - not all, but many - of the more vulnerable to hospitalization and death, it's now a matter of choice.
- As a result, a bigger spike in cases caused much fewer hospitalizations and deaths than previous spikes, meaning less impact on the rest of the health system.
- behavior has changed dramatically in terms of things like event attendance even in areas with more cautious government policy. Compare how many people went to movie theaters in late summer 2020 when they reopened in limited capacity in California with now. The limited capacity isn't the biggest difference, it's the behavior.
- we can see that, say, California has fewer cumulative deaths per capita than Texas or Florida despite the urban areas being somewhat denser[0] (which itself seems to play a big role), and Arizona has more than NY or Massachusets despite being far less dense and with much milder winters... but the differences aren't orders of magnitudes.
- masks are cheaper and more available than they were earlier, and treatments are becoming more widely available too
So this is a reasonable point to say "we aren't able to eliminate this thing, but fortunately, it's much less dangerous to most of us than it used to be."
But make no mistakes: the biggest factor there in terms of danger is the vaccines, which have now been available over a year.
[0] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/cumulative-covid-1...
Where I live (California), nearly everyone is using surgical masks or cloth masks, which have been proven to be almost entirely decorative, or none at all, so I have trouble believing this. Perhaps for the vulnerable population.
This is the big one. Ever since the upset in the Virginia governor's race, the Democrats have been very eager to end COVID restrictions no matter what. The Republicans have never cared about COVID so, at the moment there's a rare bipartisan unity on this issue.
Do you think the Omicron wave might have had more to do with the COVID restrictions than the VA governor's race?
I don't.
The case numbers in many, if not most areas, are still higher than they were during the delta wave in the Summer and Fall that led to the lockdowns and restrictions being implemented in the first place.
If this were truly just about the data then you'd expect the restrictions to lift once the case counts returned to pre-delta numbers.
Edit/Clarification: I say this as someone is/was generally been in favor of a very cautious response to COVID.
Also the context of the numbers matters. They're trending down now, not up, and the variant spikes are over. In the middle of delta/omicron we didn't know what was going to happen.
And yes, there's fatigue on everyone's part. The relative lower danger of omicron, plus being past the delta spike then the omicron spike, means we're just kind of collectively over it. Citizens have fatigue, they're just not built to stay on guard for a third year. Policy makers are fatigued, they can't force people to stay home for another year to save lives from covid just like they can't force people to stop driving to save lives from car crashes.
So admitting there's a political aspect is fine, but it's a lot more nuanced than the election cycle, which is a much more contrived explanation than everyone's response to a dramatic drop in the numbers.
The people making these decisions are not idiots, they can look at the data and make sane and rational predictions about what might happen in the future, and then adapt if necessary.
Most of the world would beg to differ. Particularly in the West, this whole situation was handled abominably and was an embarrassment at all levels. Even most doctors will tell you the CDC bungled this whole thing mightily.
Also sure its 4+months after the VA governors race but here in LA the mayoral election is up and its hot. So is the DA race...which honestly...how many voters can tell me what the DA even does outside of their exposure to law and order?
Sheer numbers of cases and deaths don't reflect the need to drop vigilance, esp to a level where no one wears masks regardless of vaccination status. Our president just announced months ago (over the holidays) that people who were unvaxxed were likely to die with a press release the equivalent of a :shrug: emoji.
This is definitely due to the wind down of the omicron cases but chance and luck is what will keep us from another wave, not droppings masks and having no vaccination mandates or having them sector by sector driven by industry.
Add in weather and TX and FL are actually nice places to live for the most part.
Why hasn't the Biden administration fixed this, by the way? Anyone know?
Frankly it's astonishing how few Trump-era policies have been reversed by this administration. When the GOP-dominated Congress acted to remove the SALT deduction, I always assumed it was just a bit of petty electoral revenge that would be reverted almost immediately. That appears to have been wrong. There's no shortage of similar examples, from immigration policy to idiotic "easy to win" trade wars to USPS governance, where Trump policies have survived so long that it's hard to believe that the Democrats don't agree with them.
Democrats do not really have a leg to stand on if they want to push progressive taxes. With the standard deduction at $13k/$25k, only the richest households in the solid Democrat states are affected by SALT deduction caps, and there is no reason for politicians not from those states to compromise on it.
Even the politicians from the high tax states have a tough time answering why they are holding up legislation to benefit the highest 10% of incomes of the state.
It was a pretty genius political move by Republicans.
Edit:
> There's no shortage of similar examples, from immigration policy to idiotic "easy to win" trade wars to USPS governance, where Trump policies have survived so long that it's hard to believe that the Democrats don't agree with them.
Also, a lot of these things require Senate approval which Dems do not have. When Trump was in office, all the Repubs were lockstep behind him, so he could push through a ton of stuff. Dems have not had this position since the Clinton days in the 90s.
That's not a reason. Double taxation of individuals is not OK.
There is no law that says two different governments each cannot collect x% of your income.
What reason there is for one to need to be able to reduce amounts owed to entity A simply because they also owe entity B?
Entity A and B can be a retail store, grocery store, plumber, government, whoever.
Fortunately, that's one advantage to the system we have -- if you don't feel that Sacramento and Washington, DC should both get a crack at your income, you can always move to a state with no income tax. I did.
This link goes into more detail:
https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/07/what-is-the-salt-cap-and-w...
Tack on the 5% income tax rate, and you'll hit the cap pretty easily. For example, a single person making any amount (with that property tax amount) will hit the cap. Ditto for a couple each making $145k.
There are a handful of states with extremely high taxes (IL/NJ/CT/CA/NY/MD/etc), but they are solidly Democrat. I do not envision the other Democrat states who would not benefit from SALT cap increases to care about going out on a limb for them.
This is a great article summarizing what I am trying to say.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/591378-salt-change-likel...
> Critics grumble that raising the cap on SALT deductions runs counter to what they say is the main political rationale for passing the legislation: addressing wealth inequality.
Repubs really put Dems in a bad spot with this one.
The thing with capping SALT is that it is all of petty electoral revenge, a structural incentive to state policies Republicans like, and, because of who is individually impacted by first-order effects of the cap, a political trap for Democrats.