Here’s what the debate over ending California’s COVID emergency is really about

Ending the pandemic emergency Gov. Gavin Newsom declared two years ago is, according to some of his fellow California politicians, an emergency in and of itself. The urgency with which they’re demanding a return to normalcy says much about our national mishandling of the crisis.

State Sen. Melissa Melendez, a Southern California Republican whose resolution to end the emergency didn’t emerge from a Senate committee last week, lamented that the governor would retain the fearsome if theoretical power to “close schools and shut down businesses.” Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, a Rocklin Republican who has sued Newsom over the issue, accused the governor of nothing less than a “blatant violation of the Emergency Services Act.” And Republican Senate leader Scott Wilk was so apoplectic as to resort to a quarter-century-old sitcom reference, threatening a wholesale “airing of grievances” against the governor in the tradition of the fictitious holiday Festivus, popularized by “Seinfeld.”

Contrary to the impression left by all of this, Newsom hasn’t hesitated to end emergencies. In fact, though it went largely unnoticed, he terminated no fewer than a dozen of them just a few weeks ago. They included four wildfires, four heat waves, one hepatitis outbreak and a total of seven crises that predated his administration, the oldest being the Santa Barbara oil spill of 2015.

Whither the hue and cry over these obsolete emergencies — or jubilation at their official termination? Nowhither, that’s whither.

That’s because few in the Capitol really care about the constitutional or governance implications of emergencies in the abstract. COVID, which is still killing an average of more than 100 Californians a day, is plainly more pressing than, say, the August 2020 heat wave, which was still on the books as a statewide emergency as of a month ago. But much like the resistance to vaccination, masks or any other evidence of the burden of social responsibility and current events, ending the pandemic emergency is a proxy for ending the pandemic.

That no politician has any more power to eradicate the novel coronavirus than to cool a heat wave, extinguish a wildfire or cure hepatitis isn’t likely to stop many of them from pretending otherwise.

Telling one’s constituents what they want to hear, regardless of whether it’s true, is an abiding temptation of politics, limited only by the character of the politician and the credulity of the public — factors that often aren’t very limiting. The dominant dynamic of the pandemic has therefore been a collective oscillation between believing the regrettable reality before us and giving in to our fervent desire to disbelieve overwhelming evidence.

The political preoccupation with pandemic denial is partisan in degree but bipartisan in kind. Republicans are only more dedicated to the cause, mainly because large swaths of their political base are at this point primed to believe anything.

Take the “People’s Convoy” of truck drivers that made its way from Fresno, the Southern California exurbs and other places around the country in recent weeks to Washington, D.C., where it was welcomed by prominent Republicans. The ragtag right-wing demonstration was replete with claims that the coronavirus does not exist, that vaccines are harmful or malicious, and that Donald Trump won the last election. But most of all, the participants “just want to go back to the way it was before the COVID stuff,” as one trucker put it — as if wanting were the same as having.

The most frequent target of the truckers was “the mask things and the shots and all this.” And yet those COVID mandates that remain, if they ever took effect with any force, are being lifted across the country by Democrats, not least Newsom.

When the governor ended 12 other California emergencies last month, he also terminated 37 COVID emergency orders immediately or within a few months, after which 95% of his original pandemic orders will have been discontinued. Those still in effect make mostly modest modifications to California’s dense thicket of workplace, health and other regulations — letting out-of-state health care providers work here, for example, or allowing pharmacists to administer COVID vaccines. It’s hardly the stuff of black-helicopter, “X-Files”-style paranoid fantasies, to make another television reference from another century.

Newsom may be a bête noire of the pandemic-denying right, but he has been loath to impose strict vaccination requirements and has already lifted most mask mandates, even for schools and day care centers where vaccination rates are low or nonexistent. As the pandemic has entered its third year amid a lull in infections — almost as if what went down hadn’t come back up with dreary regularity over the past two years — some of the most COVID-cautious, Democratic-led governments in the country have been all too eager to throw caution to the wind-borne respiratory droplets. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, for example, joined Los Angeles County and New York City in canceling vaccination requirements at bars and restaurants while urging office drones back to their cubicles and tourists back to their traps.

Limited by a base that is more reality-based, liberal politicians must allow obvious evidence of a continuing crisis to temper their urge to tell us everything is all right. But as long as the signs of the next surge are confined to overseas outbreaks and underground sewage, even Democratic politicians are nevertheless in a rush to assure us that the emergency is all but over.

This story was originally published March 20, 2022 at 5:00 AM.