Removing masking requirements won’t help either. Anyway, no wards are below the German rollback threshold of 50 new cases per 100,000 per week–which also is the moderate threshold the CDC uses (0.05% in the second column below; n/a is not available):

All wards, except for Wards 2, 3, and 5 had substantial increases, while Ward 8 had a large decline, with new positives in the city increasing by eighteen percent. One thing to note is that the figures for two weeks ago were affected by the Great Unknowning (over 1,000 cases were assigned to the unknown category), which would make the number of cases from 1 – 2 weeks ago seem larger than they might be, so that eighteen percent might be considerably higher. Percent positive rates remain good. As has been the case for the last few weeks, vaccination among adults was higher than it has been, doubling to about 0.2% of that population per day. We had only one death in the last week.

While I hope to discuss this more on Friday, Mayor Bowser seems to be leaning hard into the word endemic–and naturally, she’s misusing it. She’s using that as an excuse to let ‘er rip. Yes, deaths and hospitalization likely will be lower due to vaccination, but there is no mention of long COVID. Even if it only affects two percent of the vaccinated population, depending on the ‘endemic’ rate, that could be a lot of long-term, possibly permanent disability. I’ve discussed what an acceptable level of COVID could be, but our political leaders, not to mention many Thinky Thought Leaders, simply are going with hunches. They would never do that with other policy, but continue to do so regarding COVID, despite the repeated failures of that strategy.

We’re so close, but instead of closing out strong, we’re slowing down.

Anger is the appropriate emotion.