Philip Bump, a national correspondent for The Washington Post, made an observation which he really didn’t think through:

Dealt a bad hand, Democrats are poised to make it worse

The collapse of containment

by Philip Bump | Wednesday, February 9, 2022 | 4:27 PM EST

Before my wife popped into a convenience store on Monday to grab a soda, she put on a mask. That is the rule in New York state, after all: masks to be worn indoors even when vaccinated. She’d probably have worn a mask anyway, with an unvaccinated kid at home, cases in our area still high and test positivity at 10 percent.

As she put it on, a man leaving the store mocked her. “Gotta get that mask on!” he said — while not wearing a mask, of course. There was a brief, condescending exchange that culminated with my wife responding using language that the editors of The Post would ask I not include in this article.

It’s a useful incident to consider when reflecting on how the debate over containing the coronavirus has progressed. The man was not adhering to the state mandate, but, as of Thursday, there will be no mandate to which he needs to adhere. New York, like a number of other blue states, is rescinding its state-level mask guidance. Here, the mandate was implemented at the outset of the omicron variant surge. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy (D) went further, announcing an end to masking in schools at the end of the month.

There’s more at the original. You can get around the Post’s paywall and read it here as well.

What did Mr Bump miss? He wrote, “The man was not adhering to the state mandate, but, as of Thursday, there will be no mandate to which he needs to adhere.” It’s pretty clear that there was no mask mandate to which he needed to adhere on Monday, either, in that he didn’t adhere to it, and there were no consequences to his declining to wear a mask other than Mrs Bump apparently using language toward him that the editors of the Post would prefer not to print.

There is no statewide mask mandate in Kentucky, though there surely would have been had the General Assembly not curtailed Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) executive authority under KRS 39A. Yet the Kroger company KR: (%), which operates grocery stores throughout the Commonwealth, had issued its own mask mandate for its stores, and the Kroger our family uses, on Bypass Road in Richmond, still has a mandatory mask requirement sign beside the doors.

While I have not taken a precise count, observationally fewer than half of the customers in the store wear masks; I certainly do not.

Murphy and fellow Democrats like Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (N.Y.) are linking the shifts to the decline in cases after the spike that accompanied the emergence of the omicron variant. But they’re also acknowledging in the news media that the changes in policy are driven by the broad, bipartisan exhaustion with the pandemic. The New York Times reported that Murphy conducted focus groups measuring that frustration and that his decision to rescind mask mandates for schools was linked to that frustration.

This is politics, of course, and the will of the voters is important to track. But allowing the impression to set that politics is the central driver for the change — an impression that’s hard to avoid at this point — Democratic leaders are both undercutting their ability to respond to the pandemic moving forward and undercutting two years of rhetoric.

What? An elected politician, paying attention to the will of the voters? Heaven forfend! But, as the shoppers in Kroger here, and as the man who mocked Mrs Bump, did, people are voting with their faces, people are disobeying the mask mandates wherever they can, and they are able to do so because no one is enforcing them. Certainly no one at Kroger is doing so, and even some of their employees are wearing the masks below their noses. The convenience store into which Mrs Bump walked didn’t enforce the mask mandate on the customer who mocked Mrs Bump. With 2022 being an election year, it is not much of a surprise that elected officials have taken notice.

Mr Bump wrote that the Democratic leaders who are ending mask mandates are undercutting their ability to respond to the panicdemic pandemic going forward, but the truth is different: their ability to respond has already been undercut by public fatigue and public non-compliance. The peasants, Mr Bump fears, are revolting.