As U.S. COVID Cases Top 77M, Cities & States Plan to Repeal Mask Mandates (Is It Because of Ottawa?)

The United States today surpassed 77 million COVID cases. According to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, there have been 77,051,222 cases resulting in 908,816 deaths representing a mortality rate of 1.2%. 

In the midst of these developments, several cities and states have announced plans to end mask mandates, curtail them, and in the case of certain states, leave it up to municipalities to make that call. Yesterday, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and Oregon have all announced plans to end mask mandates in schools by the end of this month or next month. Although California is leaving its school mask mandate in place, it will its end indoor mask mandate on February 15th (one week from today) although municipalities have the flexibility to maintain such requirements and Los Angeles County plans to keep theirs in place for now.

While it is true that cases and hospitalizations have been declining, I cannot help but think the Democratic governors in each of these five states are taking a look at what is happening in Ottawa and taking steps to end COVID restrictions as soon as people so as to prevent a convoy of trucks coming to their jurisdiction although for the moment their target is confined to Washington, D.C. These convoys have now made their way to New Zealand and Australia and have their eyes set on Europe.

As for Canada, Saskatchewan has announced it will end vaccine passports starting on Valentine's Day and end mask mandates at the end of the month. Saskatchewan's neighbor to the west Alberta has gone further than that and will end its vaccine passport at midnight with school mask mandates to expire on Monday with the province wide mask mandate to end on March 1st. Of course, Alberta and Saskatchewan have more conservative governments but how far behind can a province with a social democratic government like B.C. be?

I cannot imagine all of these jurisdictions throughout North America making these announcements if there wasn't chaos on the streets of Ottawa not to mention the temporary shutdown the U.S.-Canadian border as there was yesterday at the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. 

While I would like to see live get back to normal, I have a feeling the state governors and provincial premiers making these decisions are doing so because of what is happening on the streets rather than what is happening in the science lab and that we going to pay a bigger price for it then we have already paid.