… just when you thought it was safe to go shopping.

Is the public health security state gone? Not so far.

Early on I predicted that, contrary to some conspiracy theory predictions, it would not be permanent. People would get tired of it and the system, as if often does, moves on before sufficient resistance builds up and public non-compliance makes a complete mockery of it. But once the precedent has been set, it remains stacked in the card deck. The real impetus for the dismantling of the COVID state was general public disgust with the whole thing. Polls showed that much of the public had turned against COVID measures. But polls change all the time. And the Left likes to rotate back and forth between crises.

What’s going to happen when the Ukraine crisis wears out and the Biden admin can’t blame runaway inflation on the war anymore? Glad you asked.

Rising Covid infections led Philadelphia officials to reinstate its mask mandate today. Just five weeks ago, the City of Brotherly Love dropped its indoor mask requirement. But as Covid-19 cases ticked upward, the city health department has decided to put the brakes back on.

“This looks like we may be at the start of a new Covid wave, like Europe just saw,” Dr. Cheryl Bettigole, the city’s health commissioner said at a news briefing. “I suspect that this wave will be smaller than the one we saw in January. But if we wait to find out and put our masks back on, we’ll have lost our chance to stop the wave.”

Two weeks to flatten the curve.

If you’re wondering what Cheryl Bettigole’s qualifications are, she “served as the Chief Medical Office of Complete Care Health Network, a Federally Qualified/Migrant Health Center in New Jersey” and “was the president of the National Physicians Alliance (now part of Doctors for America) in 2012/2013, where she helped build a task force on gun violence prevention and advocated for access to quality, affordable healthcare for all.”

Lest you might be under the unfortunate impression that Cheryl’s credentials are medical, not political.

Dr. Bettigole said the city has met the threshold to trigger a return to mandatory indoor mask-wearing. Today Philadelphia moved from ‘Level 1: All Clear’ into ‘Level 2: Mask Precautions.’ The city meets two of three criteria per the city’s guidance necessary to trigger the mask mandate.

The first criteria is that the average new daily Covid-19 cases is above 100. The number of new daily cases jumped significantly from 94 per day last week to 142 this week. Second, cases has increased by more than 50% in the previous 10 days. The third criteria, the only one not met, is that the number of Covid-related hospitalizations does not exceed 100. The city is currently reporting 46 hospitalized cases.

46 hospitalized cases and over 100 daily cases. That’s enough to start the public health security state again.