The buck doesn’t stop here

Well, well, well, California will end its indoor masking requirement for vaccinated people next week but masks will still be mandated for schoolchildren, state health officials announced Monday, Feb. 2, due to dramatically falling coronavirus cases.

California has seen a 65% drop in case rates since the peak during the wintertime Omicron surge, according to the California Department of Public Health (CDPH).

After Feb. 15, according to a Q&A-formatted statement issued by CDPH, unvaccinated people still will be required to be masked indoors, and everyone — vaccinated or not — will have to wear masks in higherrisk areas like public transit and nursing homes and other congregate living facilities, officials said. County Public Health Department are allowed to continue their own indoor masking requirements. Already it appears most counties in the state, including all in the Bay Area (with the exception of Santa Clara), have indicated they will end local masking rules in accordance with the new state policy. Los Angeles County’s health officials said they intend to keep theirs in place beyond the state deadline. It plans to keep indoor mask requirements in place until the county has two straight weeks at or below a “moderate” rate of 50 new cases per 100,000 people and there aren’t any reports of a new variant on the loose.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, brought back the masking mandate in mid-December as Omicron gained momentum and last month extended the requirement through Feb. 15. California passed 80,000 pandemic deaths and 8 million confirmed positive cases last week but new cases, hospitalizations and ICU admissions have all continued trending downward and, as projected by Dr. Anthony Fauci, all things Pandemica are expected to decline at a rapid clip.

Before resuming the masking requirement in December, California had lifted the requirement for people who were vaccinated as of June 15, a date that Newsom had described then as the state’s grand reopening. However, many counties soon reinstituted local mask orders as the summer delta surge took hold.

Newsom, a Democrat, has been beaten like a piñata by Republicans, anti-maskers, antivaxers, anti-government-hasno-right-to-infringe-on-my-constitutional-freedoms, and other assorted critics to terminate the mandates. He repeatedly argues the state is planning for the day when the Pandemic can be considered an “Endemic,” with rules and regs that reflect the reality it is here to stay but can be handled reasonably and cautiously.

I don’t dispute his argument or logic, but why doesn’t he reveal what his “Endemic Plan” is, so everyone can have the opportunity evaluate it.

Instead Newsom has passed the buck to California’s 58 counties and told them to figure it out.

This is the kind of problem — after all it is called a Pandemic for a reason — that calls for a unified, cohesive, internally consistent solution. Is it really a good idea to have 58 counties deciding whether or not they’re going to have one set of rules or another, or maybe no rules at all.

Is Omicron or COVID-19 going to stop spreading because of a boundary line separating one county from another?

It’s clear Newsom’s kitchen is too warm for him because of Pandemic politics.

Well, the heat in that kitchen is what he signed up for when he was elected governor.

President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk with “The buck stops here” inscribed on it.

Truman said it meant that he didn’t pass the buck to anyone else but accepted personal responsibility for the way the country was governed, and it is a promise that responsibility will not be passed on to anyone else.

Newsom should check that sign out.

Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, observer@pacific.net, the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District, and is also chairman of the Laytonville Area Municipal Advisory Council. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org