And the hits just keep on coming!
Two to three months ago, some online commenters expressed serious worry that widespread mask mandates would be reintroduced in the fall. Major news outlets dismissed those who said this as “conspiracy theorists” and said there was “no support” for their prediction.
But now these “conspiracy theorists” whose forecasts had “no support” have been proven right—and not for the first time. Just yesterday, Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park introduced a brand new mask mandate. Not three years ago. Yesterday! In other words, those who feared masks would come back in the fall were dismissed as wild-eyed paranoiacs, even though masks did indeed go on to be reintroduced in the fall. It doesn’t help the media’s case that other so-called fact-checking articles released around the same time about other COVID-related claims were themselves already known to be wrong.
In addition, the park has canceled several films and presentations, citing COVID.
It was not Hawaii that issued the restored mask mandate or canceled these programs, even though Hawaii had among the most draconian restrictions of any U.S. state. Hawaiʻi Volcanoes is a national park, not a state park—so it’s the federal government that’s at fault. The problem is at the national level—not just state. The park cited a now-infamous map published by the CDC and updated weekly. This color-coded map deigns to show the level of COVID in every U.S. county. Counties with “high”, “medium”, and “low” spread are shown in orange, yellow, and green, respectively. A few months ago, the CDC began basing this map strictly on per capita hospitalization levels, but there’s some caveats to that. For one thing, many counties no longer report data weekly, so their hospitalization info may include cases dating back weeks or months—which artificially inflates these counties’ COVID prevalence shown on the map. In addition, in many areas, the CDC uses hospitalization data from whole groups of counties. So the color code for each individual county in the area is based on the total number of hospitalizations for the whole region.
Suppose you live in a county with 20,000 people that is part of a four-county area with a population of 80,000. Suppose the number of new hospitalizations for the entire area is 10. But instead of basing the color codes on 10 hospitalizations per 80,000 people, the CDC bases it on 10 hospitalizations per the population of each county individually. So the CDC shows the county with 20,000 as having four times the hospitalization rate that the area actually has. This is despite the fact that the only way that would actually be true is if all 10 hospitalizations were in that county. This practice might not be used for Hawaii County, Hawaii—the county at issue in this entry—but it shows that the map is not only inaccurate but sometimes deliberately so—in order to justify tighter restrictions.
It is not known where the CDC got its data for Hawaii County. Even data put out by the state shows COVID numbers are cratering in that county. Some have accused the CDC of simply making up its data. Given the CDC’s sorry record, that appears to be a very reasonable accusation. The past four years have been one embarrassment for the CDC after another.
In fact, state data contradicts CDC numbers outright. The state reported only 51 new hospitalizations statewide last week, while the CDC claimed there were 75 in Hawaii County alone. Both statements can’t be true.
Because of the new mask mandate, many tourists said they were canceling all visits to Hawaii they had planned for any time in the foreseeable future. This means the state is losing tourism dollars because of the federal government’s faulty data that wasn’t even backed up by the state’s own numbers. One wrote on Twitter, “If you want to play games then play games.” Others thought the announcement of the new mask mandate was from a parody account, not the park’s real account.
The media spent so much ink on how fears of new mask mandates were unfounded—only for a new mandate to appear as soon as the ink dried.