With cases of COVID-19 rising and new worrisome strains of the virus emerging, some public officials are grappling with what their latest response should be.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves has made up his mind, no matter what comes.
“We will not return to widespread masking or COVID rules. ... we will go to school, we will go to church, we will go to work, and we will play sports. We will live in self-determination, not top-down fear,” Reeves said late last month on a social media post.
Although we wish the governor took a less aggressive, less cocksure tone about a virus that still defies human mastery, his point is well-taken.
Even with COVID-19 cases rising, the numbers are a fraction of what they were in 2020 and 2021, when the virus exploded as a public health threat. We also have a fairly effective vaccine defense that we didn’t have in those early years of the virus either.
Dealing with COVID-19 is a balancing act. You must, to borrow a metaphor, pick your poison. Do you hunker down, cripple business activity, bring social life to a halt and subject students to substandard distance learning? Or do you take the chance that, if you catch the virus, your three-plus years of exposure and vaccinations have given you enough built-up immunity that the effects of infection will be modest?
Reeves says that he is going to leave that choice to individuals and let them make the call for themselves and their family. If you feel more comfortable wearing a mask, wear one. If you don’t want to be around crowds, skip ballgames, weddings and funerals. If you want to home-school your children rather than expose them to classroom germs, hopefully their education will work out.
At this juncture in the pandemic, the self-determination route seems to be a reasonable approach to adopt. It’s one that Reeves is taking partly because it resonates with his conservative base and partly because it is rooted in his lived experience as governor.
When COVID arrived in 2020, Reeves struggled with what to do, and his messaging wasn’t always consistent. He encouraged for months that people should wear masks and eventually mandated it statewide. He later sounded as if he became allergic to them. He went along for a few weeks with severely restricting so-called non-essential businesses and for a few months with shutting down schools, following the advice of the health professionals. He later said he regretted some of those shutdowns and credited Mississippi’s decision to reopen schools quicker than many other parts of the country for the state’s better-than-average rebound from COVID-related learning loss.
But there were serious consequences, too, from refusing to be overly cautious. Mississippi had one of the higher infection and death rates in the country. It had one of the lower inoculation rates. Reeves, if he is going to be honest, needs to acknowledge those downsides, too.
The governor is treating COVID-19 now like a strain of the seasonal flu, which kills tens of thousands of Americans every winter without much public notice. There are ways to reduce the risk of getting seriously ill or dying from a virus of whatever variety. Those precautions are, most notably, vaccination, washing your hands regularly, and keeping your immune system healthy with proper rest and exercise. If you are in a high-risk category, either because of your age or underlying health problems, you might be wise to be more cautious than that.
But it’s your call, not the government’s, the governor is saying. Unless circumstances change dramatically for the worse, that approach makes sense.
