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With Donald Trump safely out of the way, it is now safe for politicians and their friends in the media to begin scaling back their panicked hysteria over covid-19.
For example, last week the Democratic mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, suddenly had a change of heart on the city’s forced lockdowns and announced she’ll work to scale back the state’s covid-19 mandates. The local CBS affiliate reports:
Thursday morning, Lightfoot said she plans to have a conversation with Gov. JB Pritzker about how to begin rolling back virus mitigation efforts ASAP.
“I want to get our restaurants and bars reopened as quickly as possible,” she said.
Meanwhile, in Colorado, the governor announced a few hours before Biden was inaugurated that he was shutting down the state’s never-used emergency hospital. The local Fox affiliate reports:
The Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management announced Tuesday evening that the Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver will be decommissioned as an alternative care site for COVID-19 patients.
A spokesperson for the division confirms the Convention Center never housed any patients.
The Convention Center was prepared to house up to 2,200 patients if hospitals could not handle the demand. The conversion into a makeshift hospital was made in April 2020.
For months, the state’s governor, Jared Polis, insisted that the overflow hospital had to be maintained and that an enormous surge in cases could happen at any time. But then, at virtually the same time Biden was inaugurated, Polis announced these precautions weren’t needed anymore.
Meanwhile, the governor of Massachusetts (a Republican critic of Donald Trump) announced today that he “would begin lifting some coronavirus restrictions” including the stay-at-home advisory and the 9:30 p.m. curfew.
Keep in mind that the regular flu season doesn’t peak until March, which means we ought to still be hearing about how we must fear the “twindemic” and how we still have a long, hard winter ahead of us. At least, that’s what we were still hearing in December. But now, suddenly, with at least two months of the peak-mortality period to go, we’re hearing that everything is headed in the right direction. It could all be a coincidence, but I remain skeptical.
