The disconnect between the White House and other Democrats executives just landed on Joe Biden’s doorstep — literally. Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser announced earlier today that they will stop requiring indoor venues to verify vaccination before allowing entry. And while Biden insists that mask-mandate rollbacks are “premature,” Bowser pledged that the district’s mandates will be “rolled back” in two weeks:

Beginning February 15, 2022, indoor venues will no longer be required to verify that patrons are vaccinated.

Businesses may choose to keep vaccination requirements in place. pic.twitter.com/iUzgEHfhsa

— Mayor Muriel Bowser (@MayorBowser) February 14, 2022

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced Monday that the city will end its requirement for people entering businesses to show proof of vaccination starting this week and will lift its mask mandate for businesses starting on March 1.

Bowser cited a sharp decline in cases in the omicron wave as justification for the loosening of restrictions.

Depressingly, the mask-mandate “rollback” will not include schools, where children are neither at substantial risk for acute infection or vectors for transmission:

Masks will still be required in schools, an area of strong controversy, and some situations like public transit, Bowser said, while the broader mandate will be lifted next month.

Bowser told reporters the city had seen a “precipitous drop” in case levels, justifying the loosening.

“Strong controversy” is one way of putting it. “Completely unfounded by science and data” is another. The only purpose of imposing a mask mandate on children is to protect adults, when adults — especially teachers — have had access to vaccines for a year now. Teachers and other school staff could still choose to wear masks on their own, even if children don’t. Schoolrooms should be the first places that mask mandates get reversed, not the last, because they never should have been imposed in classrooms at all.

So what was the dramatic falloff Bowser cites for the overall rollbacks, especially on vaccination-check mandates? The New York Times dashboard gives us a peek:

It’s worth noting a couple of points in this data. First, the correlated deaths did spike up significantly in the Omicron wave, although the lack of causal-connection metrics is still a big problem in this data. In a variant as transmissible as Omicron, one has to wonder how many deaths involved people with non-acute exposure to Omicron prior to expiring. Nevertheless, the spike in cases likely got understated initially by the lack of testing, a situation that began easing midway through the spike. The likely spread was much higher.

Now let’s look at the NYT dashboard for the US overall:

Those numbers are trending in the right direction, too. They’re still higher per 100K than in DC, but hospitalizations have dropped dramatically even before HHS starts requiring causative-only admission reports. The rate of decreases in cases is better in the US overall than in DC (-67% to -60%), and the rate of correlated deaths actually went up in DC 14% over the last two weeks while it fell nationwide by three percent. Given that correlated deaths are lagging indicators for COVID-19 waves, it looks like the US is actually ahead of DC epidemiologically speaking.

So why hasn’t the Biden administration recognized that? In large part, it’s because the White House and congressional leadership is behind the rest of the US, both politically and culturally as well as epidemiologically. Bowser’s just the latest Democratic executive to belatedly discover this with vaccination-check mandates, and it’s a safe bet the mask mandates will “roll back” sooner than Bowser projects here too.

This puts the White House and CDC in the embarrassing predicament of not having its writ run even in the District of Columbia, let alone the nation as a whole. Leana Wen, a progressive critic of the Biden administration lately, told Axios that the CDC missed its opportunity to lay out evidence-based off-ramps. The masks should already have come off, and the CDC has a rapidly closing window to acknowledge that and salvage some credibility:

“Governors had to act because they could not wait any longer. They ultimately respond to their constituents and the sentiment has really changed in the country over the last several weeks,” Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, told Axios.

“I wish the CDC had laid out these off-ramps and on-ramps,” she said. But “they still have a very narrow window of opportunity to do so because many of the mask-easing rules have not gone into effect yet.”

What they’re saying: Public health experts said there are a number of different ways for officials to think about what guideposts they’re using to remove restrictions — and communicate them to the public.

“Let’s make it really simple,” Wen said. “There should only be two things we look at at this point. No. 1: Are hospitals and ICUs overwhelmed? No. 2: Are the vaccines still protective against severe illness? As long as hospitals are not overwhelmed and vaccines protect against severe illness, we should not have required masking or other restrictions.”

Even Bowser’s actions are too little and too late in that regard, although she’s still ahead of the White House. It’s long past time for new leadership in this pandemic, and if Biden won’t provide it, executives of both parties in states and cities will fill that need instead.