Professor Balicer had warned in May that despite the early success, Israel’s pandemic was not over. In this vein, it’s important that we encourage people to take responsibility for their own choices, speak to their trusted doctors about vaccines and treatments, and demand government’s role in the pandemic be lessened.īorelli represents Staten Island in the City Council.The Delta variant has since taken over in Israel, and now mainly comes from within the country. With our masks on for photo ops, we won Emmy awards in COVID theatrics. Not to mention, there were countless stories of overt hypocrisy. Every new mandate got a thousand retweets, every rise in cases brought a CNN hit. While many Americans suffered through the pandemic, many lawmakers basked in the glory, loving the attention, with some even profiting personally. In truth, politicians, myself included, haven’t earned the public’s trust enough to continue making health decisions for their families. Acting as though there is some politician, political commentator or politically biased news network out there that can cure it is laughable, as though we have forgotten most Americans do not trust, and really can’t stand, the political class. Both Presidents Trump and Biden urged Americans to get vaccinated, but there still seems to be lagging rates among conservatives, Blacks, Hispanics and young adults.

Moreover, If the hyper-politicization of COVID causes vaccine hesitancy, then it knows no party affiliation. Though cases are rising, the number of serious cases and deaths are nowhere near as bad as they were nationwide earlier this year, yet the confusing stories and messaging from our leaders is driving our tectonic plates further apart. The recent hyperbolized coverage of the delta variant is a case in point. It can end both the clickbait nature of COVID coverage, and also shift away from framing the viral response as political news rather than health news. The media has an important role to play in curtailing this.

This seems to be happening here in New York, right now, as well. Moreover, in the U.K., where restrictions were recently eased despite the delta variant accounting for 99% of new cases, the vaccine was successful in preventing the correlating rise in hospitalizations and deaths seen in past waves. In raw numbers, the CDC reports that out of 163 million vaccinated adults, only 6,587 serious breakthrough cases have been documented, a minuscule fraction of a percent. Yes, there are some infections among the fully vaccinated, but those are almost always minor cases, not ones that require serious treatment. For the fully vaccinated, hospitalization rates range from 0.00% to 0.06%. No politician nor health expert had ever said they would be 100% effective, but that’s not the standard. But I strongly urge him to hold his line against new lockdown measures, and avoid creating two classes of New Yorkers through vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. The mayor is right to view the vaccine as the knockout punch, and he is right to change our metrics to reflect “cases, doses and hospitalizations,” rather than the positivity rate. We have entered a new one where personal responsibility must replace collective sacrifice. Thanks to the vaccine, we are well beyond the group stages of the pandemic. Kudos to all for participating, but New York must be past that phase now.

Those were the days of communal lockdowns, shared sacrifice, “flattening the curve” and all that. “We’re all in this together” was the global rallying cry as the early waves of the COVID-19 pandemic stretched far and wide.

Nyc lockdown august 2021