DALLAS, TX —Welcome to the Wild West.
The Centers for Disease Control relaxed its guidelines for social distancing and mask wearing today, and now . . . it’s anyone guess what will happen.
According to the CDC, it’s now safe for fully vaccinated people to stop wearing masks inside in most places — as well as outdoors, even in crowds. The organization still recommends mask wearing in such compact indoor settings as public transportation (including planes), hospitals, homeless shelters and prisons. But they are soon expected to issue newly relaxed recommendations for reopening schools and indoor workplaces as well.
Take a deep breath, because that just may be the best news to hit America in a year.
From there, it’s decidedly murkier. What happens if some workers don’t want to return to a place where not everyone is vaccinated? Can employers require vaccination to remain at a job or to be hired? Will an employee who refuses to be inoculated be able to keep his or her paycheck and work from home?
Certainly the news about prisons, homeless shelters and hospitals is vital information, but most Americans are not spending the night in any of those places. What about restaurants? Are those considered “crowded” indoor spaces by the CDC?
What about gyms and supermarkets, where there’s an ongoing war between staffs who don’t enforce mask wearing of their coworkers or clientele? Many of these debate-weary employees already go about their business with nostrils exposed, wearing their masks hanging below their mouths or tucked under their chins.
Lastly, it would be useful to know how much science is behind these revisions, and how much is intended to boost the economy at a calculated risk to public health. It’s always been understood that reopening the economy would be a question of how much illness to risk versus how much damage an economy could sustain.
For the “worried well,” a term that’s not been in vogue since the height of the AIDS epidemic, today’s revisions effectively remove the last vestiges of government-enforced safety. Anyone wearing a mask will soon look like a nutjob, and the rest of us will be pacing massless through our day hoping that they are the real life descendants of Chicken Little, who incorrectly warned that the sky is falling.
The alternative? Why think about that when the news is so good?
