The masks are back in the city of Philadelphia.
Beginning April 18, the city of brotherly love will reimpose indoor masking mandates for the first time since early March. “I sincerely wish we didn’t have to do this again,” said Cheryl Bettigole, the city’s health commissioner. “I wish this pandemic was over just as much as any of you.” Her hand was forced, she claimed, by Philly’s rising Covid-19 case rates. You see, the city’s seven-day average case rate increased to, as of April 8, 142 new cases.
For context, on March 1, Philadelphia County recorded an average seven-day case rate of 295 new infections. The following day, the city’s health commissioner gave the “all clear” to remove masks effective immediately. The city was, however, one of the slowest to respond to a trend against masking that overtook the Democratic political class during the winter. Today, the city could be a leading indicator of where progressives in positions of power intend to take the regions they serve.
Philly’s restoration of masking ordinances was preceded by the restoration of similar mandates in colleges and universities. Columbia University restored masking mandates earlier this month for the remainder of the spring semester, though only for the student body. Masking is optional for faculty. Barnard College, too, now requires masking after experimenting with an optional masking regime for all of one week. In Washington D.C., both Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities will require masking. Nominally, some of this is a response to rising case rates, but the political culture incubating the return of masking is a factor that cannot be dismissed. Support for the indefinite perpetuation of pandemic-related emergency measures is measurable in locales where progressivism is the dominant governing ethos.
If masking is going to make a comeback amid an increase in case rates attributable to the mild but still contagious Omicron variant, it’s important to recall the conditions that led to the abandonment of mask mandates in February.
It wasn’t a response to reduced case rates. When Democratic governors from California to New Jersey sloughed off mitigation measures in February, new cases nationally still ranged above 200,000 per day. Nor was this a response to public sentiment against masking in polling. Public opinion surveys generally showed that a majority of American adults believed the pandemic was not under control and they still supported a range of mitigation measures (though a majority also reported having returned mostly or entirely to their pre-pandemic lives). And it had nothing to do with some revelatory new “science,” which some Covid hawks trotted out to explain their overnight 180-degree shift on mask mandates. Masking mandates disappeared because the persistence of Covid mitigation measures produced diminishing political returns for Democratic politicians.
Over the course of the Omicron wave, the U.S. economy added nearly 1 million new jobs—undermining expert predictions that the surge would force Americans back into their hiding holes. Meanwhile, critical constituencies lobbied their representatives against maintaining these restrictions because they presented an obstacle to engaging in vital economic activity. The pressure on Washington to catch up with the rest of the country became apparent when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised the metrics it had previously used to determine whether the public should mask up indoors. Americans who reside in 96 percent of U.S. counties went to bed on February 24 in a high-risk zone. When they woke up, 70 percent of the nation found itself in an area with a low-to-medium risk of Covid transmission.
But the progressive left was never comfortable with the Democrats’ effort to reckon with their difficult political realities. The leftwing opinion landscape is littered with takes about the ways in which the governing class has failed the country by attempting a return to “normal” at all. “Normal” was unacceptably callous toward Americans who are immunocompromised. “Normal” fails to account for the lack of approved vaccines for children younger than five—indeed, many American cities continue to impose masking mandates only on barely ambulatory toddlers. “Normal” sacrifices American lives to the demands of corporations and special interests.
But “normal” is what Joe Biden was elected to restore. The return of Covid mitigation measures now would only reinforce the public perception that the Democratic Party has been captured by a narrow, ideologically unrepresentative pressure group. After all, it isn’t just the residents of dark-blue Philly who must mask up again after one month’s reprieve; it’s the commuters in electorally pivotal swing counties around the city who have had the tantalizing taste of “normal” turn to ashes in their mouths.
Philadelphia County still meets the CDC’s criteria for “low” transmission, but rates of infection are not driving the decision to restore masking mandates. If the many lamentations over society’s failure to observe in perpetuity restrictions on social and economic life are to be believed, masking has become more a moral imperative than a public health initiative. For millions of Americans, 2022 has been a year marred by warfare abroad and economic insecurity at home. One of the year’s few saving graces has been the pandemic’s retreat. Eastern Pennsylvania’s voters have been robbed of that small blessing. If a return to the bad old days of the pandemic is inevitable, millions more Americans will be similarly imposed upon.
In recent weeks, Covid had become so irrelevant to voters’ daily lives that it barely registers as a priority for them. Progressives are intent on reminding them that government can still take away that which they enjoy arbitrarily and without the consent of the governed. If they succeed, Democrats will regret it come November.
