This is encouraging, but as you dig into the data from YouGov, you’ll see that not all is as it appears.

Specifically, Democrats seem to have a funny idea of what being “ready to return to normal” entails. To you and me, it might mean “ready to drop all restrictions right now.”

To them, it appears to mean “ready to drop all restrictions once the virus makes it safe to do so.”

Let’s start here with YouGov’s question, “Are you ready to return to normal from the COVID-19 pandemic?” Promising results!

That’s even higher than the numbers Monmouth saw last month when it asked Americans whether COVID is here to stay and therefore it’s time to move on with our lives. Fully 70 percent answered in the affirmative to that one. In YouGov’s poll, 77 percent said so. I speculated a few days ago that as more Democratic governors cancel mandates, some lefty voters who quietly believe the time for restrictions has passed might suddenly feel liberated to express their true opinion. They’ve been given “permission” to be anti-mandate by their leaders, in other words. Maybe that explains why YouGov’s numbers are higher than Monmouth’s: Some of the fencesitters on the left have finally hopped off in the wake of mandates being lifted and are now openly ready for normalcy.

Or are they?

Here’s what happened when YouGov asked, “When do you think it will be safe to resume normal life activities?”

Just 10 percent of Democrats are ready to roll. Four times as many want to wait until next year. And 16 percent say it’ll never be safe.

Does that sound like a group that’s “ready to return to normal”?

YouGov also asked people to say when they think COVID restrictions in their community should be lifted. Verdict:

Nearly two-thirds of Democrats say it’s still too soon, which sounds to me like the opposite of “ready to return to normal.”

So I’m wondering: How did Dems end up with 68 percent agreeing that they’re “ready to return to normal from the COVID-19 pandemic”? All I can think is that some people interpreted that question as asking them if they’re tired of restrictions on life during the pandemic. And it turns out they are — but that’s a separate matter from asking whether they’re prepared to lift those restrictions. They’re willing to admit that they dislike mandates, in other words, but their “safety first” approach to COVID means those mandates need to remain in force nonetheless.

Which seems like less of a sea change in public opinion than we assumed.

Going forward, pollsters should skip broad “mindset” questions about being ready to get back to normal and focus instead on concrete measures Americans are willing to undertake to make it happen. How many supposedly “back to normal” Dems are inclined to drop mask mandates and vaccine passports to achieve normalcy, versus how many are imagining “normalcy” as resuming dining out and going to movies, etc, but with restrictions still in place?

I didn’t think we’d need a national debate on what “normalcy” during endemic COVID might entail but maybe we do. In fact, here’s how people responded when YouGov asked, “Are there parts of life before the pandemic that you think you won’t ever return to?”

A third of Americans and nearly one-half of Dems are done with true pre-pandemic normalcy … forever.

In fairness, sometimes it’s hard to blame them. New from the CDC:

The United States has recorded more than 1 million “excess deaths” since the start of the pandemic, government mortality statistics show, a toll that exceeds the officially documented lethality of the coronavirus and captures the broad consequences of the health crisis that has entered its third year…

The CDC documented 13 other types of non-covid causes of death that were inflated during the pandemic compared with historical trends starting in 2013. For example, since the start of the pandemic, the category of ischemic heart disease has recorded an additional 30,000 deaths beyond what would be expected. Deaths from hypertensive disease were nearly 62,000 higher than expected…

The CDC’s analysis estimates 208,431 excess deaths from all the non-covid causes since the start of the pandemic. At first glance, that number plus the 911,000 covid-19 deaths would suggest the excess deaths were greater than 1.1 million. But Anderson notes that many of the people who died of covid-19 were elderly, sick or very frail, and, even without a pandemic, some might not have survived across the two-year span of the pandemic. “Some of those covid deaths are not, strictly speaking, excess deaths,” he said.

Deaths attributed to COVID stand a bit north of 900,000, with another 100,000 or so deaths that we wouldn’t have otherwise expected to occur due to non-COVID causes. It’s true that some people who’ve died have done so “with” COVID rather than “of” COVID, but the total number of excess deaths is what it is. If everyone who’s died of COVID had merely died “with” COVID, the excess deaths number would be zero. Instead it’s a million plus.

And it’s still going, even though by one calculation Omicron is only a quarter as deadly as prior strains of the virus. Because it’s hypercontagious, even the “mild” new variant has managed to kill 50,000 people in just the past three weeks.

Here’s White House COVID czar Jeff Zients describing a moment that seems perpetually on the horizon without ever quite arriving.

"We're moving toward a time when Covid isn't a crisis, but is something we can protect against and treat," says White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients as the U.S. hits a 75% vaccination rate among adults pic.twitter.com/A48eibLDq3

— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) February 16, 2022