Ed cynically — and correctly — pointed out this morning that the rules are only changing now because Democratic governors need scientific cover from Team Biden to justify their decisions to drop mandates. Recent polls show that most Dem voters continue to support mask mandates despite the relentless drop in cases nationally. They’re not going to be convinced to let down their guard by any politician, even politicians from their own party whom they like and trust. They’re Following The Science™, which means they’re not relaxing local restrictions or unmasking themselves until the science bureaucracy assures them that the coast is clear.

This afternoon they got that assurance. You might have been done with masks long, long ago but lots of skittish liberals still cling to mandates. Today’s updated guidance is the first step towards convincing them to reclaim some normalcy as we (hopefully) shift to endemic COVID.

Although, to be fair, it *is* true that the Omicron surge created conditions requiring updated guidance on the scientific merits, not just because it would suit Democratic governors politically for the agency to revisit the subject. Case counts, which traditionally have been the yardstick for masking, simply no longer mean as much as they used to with a less virulent yet hypercontagious immune-escape variant circulating. “We had a pretty good understanding of the correlation of cases and hospitalizations and ICU beds and loss of life,” said an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins to USA Today. “With Omicron, that calculation really changed because the virus is so much more transmissible but significantly milder.”

We’ve reached the point where nearly everyone’s had COVID or been vaccinated or both. Time to pivot away from tying restrictions to cases and towards tying them to the amount of severe illness in the community. If local hospitals aren’t stressed and you already have some form of immunity, then whether you mask or not should be up to you. Rochelle Walensky made it official this afternoon.

This framework helps inform public health guidance at the state and local level and provides individuals an understanding of what precautions they may want to take based on their COVID-19 Community Level.

Strategies can be dialed up & dialed down based on community levels. pic.twitter.com/YqSiu6x8n7

— Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH (@CDCDirector) February 25, 2022

Today, over half of counties – representing over 70% of the U.S. population – are experiencing low or medium COVID-19 Community Levels.

This is an increase from about one third of counties at low or medium community levels last week. We continue to see progress in communities. pic.twitter.com/wzlECFf0ue

— Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH (@CDCDirector) February 25, 2022

Click here for a searchable map to see which category your county is in. My concern was that the CDC would update the guidance to change the conceptual framework for masking (i.e. linking it to hospitalizations, not cases) without doing much to change the actual facts on the ground. For instance, under the current guidance linking mask mandates to “substantial or high transmission” of the virus, 96 percent(!) of counties are in the red zone. If the new guidance linking mandates to severe illness resulted in, say 91 percent of counties remaining in the red zone, well, then, who cares? The CDC still would have nearly the entire country under a recommended mandate in that scenario. The substance of the rules would have changed but not the practical effect.

But that’s not what happened. In a blink, we’ve gone from 96 percent of counties being encouraged to mandate masks to 70 percent of the population being told that they don’t need to mask at the moment unless they want to. That’s a sea change.

And it’s not just for adults either. The policy applies to schools. In a flash, school boards across most of the country that want to mask kids in perpetuity have been undercut by the country’s most influential scientific agency:

The CDC now recommends universal school masking only in communities where Covid-19 levels are high. The CDC felt it could ease masking recommendations in schools because children are at relatively lower risk of severe disease and mostly have asymptomatic or mild infections, according to Greta Massetti, of the agency’s Covid-19 Response Incident Management Team.

That’s the true significance of today’s news. Conservatives and anti-maskers of all stripes stopped caring what the CDC said about COVID many moons ago but bureaucrats and businesses continue to follow the agency’s advice for CYA purposes. So long as they’re doing what the CDC recommends by mandating masks, they’re simply following the science. That rug has now been pulled out from under them. If they want to fight the mask wars going forward, they’ll have to do so without the heavy political artillery of being able to claim that the science is on their side. That makes kids the big winners today, freed by a new set of arbitrary standards from the shackles imposed on them by a different set of arbitrary standards.

Even the people most responsible for shackling them are pretending to be happy about it:

We welcome these long-needed new metrics for a safe off-ramp from universal masking. The CDC’s guidance is informed by science, not politics, and sets us on a path to a new normal in schools and other public places.  https://t.co/CHKW9nZSH6

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) February 25, 2022

I’ll leave you with another cynical and correct take, this time from Phil Klein: “CDC Discovers New Masking Science Right In Time for Biden’s State of the Union.”