"If not [removing the mask mandate] now, when?"

"if not [removing the mask mandate] now, when?"...

"How about when we get to levels that are on par with what we saw last summer, or roughly 1/10 of what we see today, so that spread continues to drop and we get out of the CDC's highest level of transmission before determine that we will no longer try to reduce further? How does that sound? Or maybe when we get the death rate down to single digits per day again? Even if we're not going to aim for 1 death per day perhaps we can aim lower than low double-digits per day (currently at about 40 per day but dropping)? How about we wait until cases per day fall to a much more reasonable count (right now we're at around 30 times what we were last summer and still in the ballpark of the first wave's peak... and that's without all cases being reported since home-testing isn't in those figures unless the person then goes and gets tested more formally)? How about when hospitals aren't still crowded and have 10 times more patients with COVID than they did last summer? How about we wait till it's just 3-4 times what they did last summer instead? How about we aim to be just slightly better than horrifyingly bad before we turn back to saying that we don't need to try anymore? Or how about we recognize that when we did away with the mask mandate and constraints last year, that was the telltale sign that we were about to start the long climb as 2 weeks later we effectively stopped slowing the spread and started increasing rapidly again."

Ok, so, if we take the end of May 2021 as a template of that statistics needed to remove the mask mandate, and I would argue we should strive for slightly better and/or do a better job of educating the public about the situation, then we have the following criteria:

• Cases down to <200 per day or less than 3 per 100,000 people per day (or what the CDC would consider "Moderate Transmission") ... better still would be half that to reach the CDC's "Low Transmission" We reached 197 cases per day the week that ended with the mask mandate being removed in May 2021. Our all time low came less about 3 weeks later with 66 cases per day or 1 case per 100,000 people per day and we were already back to "Moderate Transmission" before July 4. Compare that to 1,886 cases per day last week (and that number is still increasing as the data continues to come in for last week) which is much closer to the first wave's peak of 2,176 cases per day or the 1,786 cases per day that we saw this time last year than to the bar suggested here.
• Mid-single digits deaths per day. We got down to 5 per day the week the mask mandate was removed. A month later we were down to just 2 per day and reached our lowest at 1.6 the week of July 4. Compare those numbers to the 41 deaths per day we saw last week.
• Fewer than 300 beds at hospitals filled with covid patients. On the day the mask mandates were removed last year, we had 236 non-ICU beds in use, 74 ICU beds in use, and 39 people intubated. Compare that to today where we have 882 non-ICU beds in use, 168 ICU beds in use and 77 people intubated...oh and more than half of those in the hospital today were considered fully vaccinated when admitted.
• Waste Water Tracking down to around 30 copies/mL for a 7-day average.  We had 7-day averages of 42 copies/mL for the southern region and 22 copies/mL for the northern region back at the end of May 2021... those same numbers today are 209 and 159 respectively.

And don't get me wrong, we've made strides to help the situation by vaccinating more people than we had in May... but the effect of vaccinating our population shows up in these data points and therefore the targets above are still what we should push for... or we could try to push even further, maybe cut those numbers in half?