Restraint is key as COVID-19 continues on

President Joe Biden is right: There is “no federal solution” to COVID-19, as he said on Monday. The pandemic is far too complex for any politician to pretend to have the perfect solution and the trade-offs of top-down solutions are too great to take lightly.

Amid the surge in COVID-19 cases due to the omicron variant, President Biden has rightly stressed a less heavy-handed approach, which leaves more authority at the state level. Biden has prioritized the broader availability of testing, messaging the importance of vaccination and making available federal support for jurisdictions hard hit by omicron.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, likewise, earlier this month downplayed the likelihood of lockdowns. Newsom even prudently encouraged local school districts with rigid COVID-19 vaccine mandates to relax their policies so that kids can continue to remain in school.

“We’re all exhausted by this. But we have something we never had in the past, and that’s the power of these life-saving vaccines and the power to boost it to get through this arguably fifth wave of this pandemic,” said Newsom last week.

These relatively restrained approaches from President Biden and Gov. Newsom are laudable and mark a much needed shift toward a more realistic approach to the pandemic that reflects the current state of affairs.

The United States and the state of California are in a much better position than anyone could have imagined at the start of the pandemic.

The vast majority of Americans are now vaccinated, and about a third of vaccinated Americans have already received a booster shot.

Effective treatments are constantly being developed to dramatically reduce the harms of COVID-19, while testing is now broadly available and commonly utilized.

While some Americans have chosen to make the wearing of masks a culture war issue, most Americans have developed sensibilities about wearing them when it makes sense to do so with or without a government mandate.

Taken together, it makes sense for states to have more autonomy from the federal government in how they handle the pandemic and it similarly makes sense for individuals and businesses to have more autonomy from state mandates.

Getting to this point, tragically, hasn’t been easy. More than 800,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. Had it not been for the rapid development and distribution of vaccines, the loss of life would have been even more devastating.

But now we are here, nearly as equipped as we can ever hope to be. It is for that reason that people should now expect governments to default to the least restrictive options available.

As Biden has recently lifted travel restrictions from eight southern African nations, he should also swat away Dr. Anthony Fauci’s suggestion of vaccine mandates for domestic travel.

Newsom, meanwhile, should at some point be prepared to terminate his existing emergency powers and cede decision-making to local jurisdictions and of course, the Legislature.

We remain hopeful that by this time next year, the world will have made further progress in handling COVID-19 and that the world will be a bit freer. With the relative restraint of Biden and Newsom, we are cautiously optimistic we’re seeing the early signs that governments are learning that top-down plans aren’t everything.