John Bel Edwards Returns To His COVID Roots

Not enough of you have taken the vaccine, so there will be collective punishment according to your governor John Bel Edwards, for whom no tyranny is too big or small.

Louisiana on Monday reinstated a mask mandate in all indoor locations, including schools and colleges, as the state struggles with a fast-growing fourth surge of COVID-19 driven by the delta variant and one of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates.

Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards announced the mandate, which goes into effect on Wednesday, less than three months after he lifted a previous face covering requirement amid hopes that the virus was abating.

“Our latest numbers confirm that we simply have to do more,” Edwards said at a news conference surrounded by hospital and business leaders who supported the decision. The announcement came as one of Louisiana’s largest hospitals — Our Lady of the Lake Medical Center in Baton Rouge — brought in a disaster medical assistance team of nearly three dozen health care workers Monday to help the facility cope with the influx of COVID-19 patients.

“Looking ahead to tomorrow, we will report more hospitalizations than at any other point in the pandemic,” Edwards said. “Case growth per capita is the highest in the country, and the second place state is not even close. … There are no signs on the horizon that things are about to flatten.”

Edwards’ order will last until Sept. 1, but could be extended beyond that.

Louisiana reported 11,109 new cases since Friday, with 27 more deaths. The number of hospitalized climbed to 1,984 — seven times the number of COVID-19 patients a month ago. The total number of deaths since the pandemic started in early 2020 surpassed 11,000 in Monday’s newest figures.

The state has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, although the number of people who had received at least one dose rose by more than 46,000 between Thursday and Monday, to nearly 43%. More than 1.72 million, or just under 37%, are fully vaccinated.

The mask mandate will apply to anyone age 5 and older — both vaccinated and unvaccinated — who enters a business, a school, a church or other inside location. It also will cover any kindergartners if they are under the age of 5.

Students start returning to some K-12 schools this week. Louisiana’s education leaders had declined to enact any masking orders across all districts, leaving it to individual school systems to determine their plans. The governor’s executive order will end the district-by-district negotiations.

We already know that mask mandates don’t work, that they are totally ineffective in stopping the spread of COVID-19.

In fact, just today a high-ranking Biden administration expert admitted as much…

Is John Bel Edwards going to mandate that everyone wear an N95 mask when they go somewhere? Will he mandate that for unvaccinated people only?

If that’s his position, he’ll have to deal with charges of racism, since the most common contingent of unvaccinated are black and Hispanic people.

And what’s his position on unvaccinated, COVID-positive illegal aliens being deposited in Alexandria and Shreveport? If he’s serious enough about the virus and its spread, one would surmise he would be willing to stand up to the Biden administration and put a stop to that, right?

We have been down this road with John Bel Edwards for almost a year and a half at this point and it is very obvious that his virus policy amounts to a fart in the wind where COVID-19 is concerned. He’s an abject failure, by almost any metric.

But that abject failure has yet to impose consequences on him, so he will not change. Because when it comes to John Bel Edwards, it’s the power to fail which is more intoxicating than the shame of failure is disheartening. You will not recover your freedom or your prosperity until that power is gone.

If that sounds overdramatic, just watch what’s going to happen in Louisiana over the next month.

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Suicides, drug overdoses, murders, outmigration.

And then tell yourself that correlation is not causation. That’s fine. Perhaps it isn’t.

Edwards’ press conference said absolutely nothing, that we heard, about treating or curing the virus once people were exposed to it. He also said nothing about the importance of physical fitness or reducing obesity in fighting off the virus.

That’s peculiar, isn’t it? We’ve had this dark cloud over our heads for a year and a half and John Bel Edwards hasn’t collected anything from medical experts in this state or anywhere else about how best to treat this virus in the event one contracts it?

Vitamin D, zinc, anything?

One can almost conclude from this that mask mandates and the like are the end, rather than the means. Seeing as though we already know they are insufficient means to the stated end.

People will leave this state in increasing numbers now. They ought to. Louisiana’s declining quality of life doesn’t merit staying anymore.

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