Which US States Have Lifted COVID-19 Restrictions?

“Impending Doom”: The words the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, chose Monday to describe where the U.S. was headed with the current opening strategy have been repeated countless times.

Here is the ‘surge’ Walensky is freaking out about.

As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, 14 U.S. states have already lifted almost all coronavirus restrictions, according to information published by The New York Times and Kayak. No mask mandates, no stay-at-home orders or interstate travel quarantines were in place in Florida, Texas and Georgia as well as in parts of the Midwest and South, while businesses in the states were again almost fully opened.

You will find more infographics at Statista

According to Johns Hopkins University, six out of these 14 opened-up states are currently experiencing rising case numbers again.

In mid-March, only one of them had been recording more new cases. These new outbreaks in opened-up states are currently underway in the Deep North and Midwest Plains as well as in Florida.

Opened-up states which are reporting stagnating case numbers include Texas, Georgia and Mississippi.

The state that remained under most coronavirus restriction was California, where L.A. county as well as San Diego and San Francisco are still seeing many new cases.

Alaska was also mostly opened up, but still enforces an interstate travel quarantine.

All opened-up states have Republican governors.

Interestingly, after President Biden leveraged the CDC Director’s emotional outburst to urge all states to reverse their lifting of COVID restrictions, Walensky said today that:

“Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus.”

Which would appear to imply that vaccinated people therefore cannot spread the virus (you can’t spread what you can’t carry) and thus, vaccinated people have no need to wear a mask or adhere to draconian distancing rules.