Politicians are lagging indicators of pandemic precaution

At long last, the COVID-19 pandemic in Iowa is scheduled to end just before midnight tonight.

That’s according to Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who earlier this month announced she would sunset her series of public health disaster emergency proclamations first issued almost two years ago.

“We cannot continue to suspend duly enacted laws and treat COVID-19 as a public health emergency indefinitely. After two years, it’s no longer feasible or necessary,” Reynolds said.

Of course, elected officials can’t really schedule an end to an infectious disease pandemic. Politicians are lagging indicators of pandemic precaution. It’s really the people who decide when the pandemic as a part of daily life is over and for many, that point is long past.

Even if we had an appetite for it, there aren’t enough policing resources in the country to force every would-be pandemic scofflaw to obey.

In practice, the end of the disaster proclamation doesn’t mean much for Iowans. The outgoing order doesn’t include any restrictions on individual activity, it’s mostly just operational and regulatory measures within the state government. The Test Iowa system will continue operating for now. The most noticeable thing will be a change in how the state reports COVID-19 data — the coronavirus dashboard website will be decommissioned and information will instead be reported like other diseases.

The pandemic response has been partisan from the outset. Republican governors tended to impose few restrictions while Democrats generally imposed more.

It’s clear that social distancing and masks help prevent the spread of viruses. It’s also clear, however, that government authorities have a limited ability to coerce compliance. To a great extent, people are going to do what people are going to do.

Americans would be unlikely to tolerate the widespread use of heavy-handed policing to enforce pandemic protocols, like we see under China’s “zero COVID” policy, for example. Even if we had an appetite for it, there aren’t enough policing resources in the country to force every would-be pandemic scofflaw to obey.

So, governors are limited within the bounds of what their constituents will accept. Unsurprisingly, states with governors who favored stay-at-home orders, business closures and mask mandates also have electorates who were more willing to go along with them.

In Iowa, Reynolds ordered a wide range of businesses to close or limit their operations in March 2020. Within about two months, most activities were allowed to resume, initially with some restrictions in place. That brief period was the closest Iowa got to what you might call a lockdown, though no stay-at-home order was ever issued.

Except for legally embattled mask mandates by schools and local governments, Iowans have been free from significant government-imposed interventions for most of the pandemic. For that, Iowans rewarded the governor with a bigger GOP legislative majority following the 2020 elections and appear set to shoo her in for re-election this November.

As the omicron surge wanes, Democrats too are shifting away from restrictions. As of today, local officials in California are permitted by the state to wind down indoor mask mandates in most settings.

And yet it hardly seems to matter. SoFi Stadium was under a mask mandate during the Super Bowl this past weekend. Organizers handed out tens of thousands of high-quality masks at the event but few of the fans in the stands or the VIPs in the boxes wore them.

Even liberal politicians who champion restrictions are frequently seen skirting them, like Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti at the big game. “I hold my breath” he said after a similar incident at a recent playoff game. The emperors have no masks.

(319) 339-3156; adam.sullivan@thegazette.com