Flashback: Take a moment to appreciate how radically the COVID narrative has shifted in just a few months

[Geee]

Not the Bee

For two years now, we've been told that authorities, experts, and business leaders are following The Science when it comes to COVID.

Every decision, every policy, and every rule, restriction, and directive was said to emanate from The Science. To question any COVID measure was to question The Science, and doing so marked you irrevocably as Anti-Science, which is worse than being a mass murderer.

 

But it's crazy how quickly The Science can shift, isn't it? When you look at the state of things in early March 2022, it doesn't look anything like, say, December 2021. Heck, in some cases, early March looks radically different from early February.

Consider, for instance, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention's firm stance early last month against relaxing its masking guidance:

[Geee]

Leading from Behind The CDC changes its outdated, unreasonable Covid metrics well after the public had moved on.

Long after many states and localities dropped their mask mandates, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finally revised its metrics to guide community Covid-19 prevention measures. Last week, the agency went from recommending indoor masking in all schools and roughly 95 percent of U.S. counties to recommending masks in about 37 percent of U.S. counties comprising 28 percent of the U.S. population. What took so long?

The new guidelines use three metrics of virus severity to determine what the agency calls “community levels” of disease—new Covid cases and new Covid hospitalizations (both per 100,000 population in the past seven days), and the share of hospital beds occupied by patients admitted for the disease. The guidelines classify counties as experiencing low, medium, or high levels. Everyone in a high-level county should wear a mask in public indoor settings, the CDC says, but indoor masks are not recommended, even in schools, in low and medium counties.

The agency had previously relied on just two metrics—new Covid-19 cases per 100,000 people and the test positivity rate, both measured over the last seven days—to measure the level of community transmission. Counties were ranked into four tiers—low, moderate, substantial and high—with indoor masking recommended for areas of “substantial” or “high” coronavirus transmission and for all schools, regardless of tier.