Is Covid Over?

heart and sole

Walk into any store, restaurant or building around here and you will be hard pressed to find anyone wearing a mask. Unless I happen to be there, because I STILL don't want to get covid. The greater Charlotte area is in Mecklenburg County, which has had a mask mandate in place since August 31, 2021 because Covid cases continued to rise. When that mask mandate was put into place, the ruling said that the Covid test positivity rate must reach 5% or less for four straight months before the mandate would be lifted. In November, 2021 the ruling was revised to state that the mandate would be lifted when a 5% or less positivity rate existed for seven days straight.

To date, we have not reached that benchmark. In January the positivity rate was around 32%. By last week it had dropped to 20.8%. The latest number from February 13th shows the rate at 15.7%. The numbers are definitely trending in the right direction, but how much of this is due to a decrease in Covid cases versus the fact that many people are utilizing home tests? The home test numbers are not often reported to officials.

Tomorrow the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners will vote on whether or not to keep the mask mandate in place. They are getting a lot of pressure from employers, schools and businesses to drop the mandate. The states of California and Oregon have already dropped their mask mandates. I suspect Mecklenburg will do the same.

Does anyone else see the irony of our federal government paying for and distributing 400 million N95 masks right before we are all told we don't need to wear one anymore?