Well, this is what happens when the genie has left the bottle, and it’s not wearing a face mask.

In the words of Christina Aguilera, oh, woah, woah. Covid-19 cases have been on the rise throughout the U.S. This is just two months after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) changed their face mask guidelines in May so that fully vaccinated people would no longer have to wear face masks indoors, as I described then for Forbes.

Since it’s difficult to tell whether people are fully vaccinated because they may do a thing called lying, many state and local authorities soon abandoned face mask requirements all together.

And now it looks like all of this may have been premature relaxation so to speak, leaving a rather messy situation. Of course, politicians say, “sorry we screwed up” about as often as your dog says, “my bad” after he’s left a deuce on your carpet.

Nevertheless, some authorities are already having to reverse their face mask decisions. Fueled in part by the spread of the more transmissible Delta variant of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2), Covid-19 cases have indeed been back on the rise again.

For example, the number of daily new reported Covid-19 cases in Los Angeles County have more than quadrupled from June 15 to July 15. Similarly, San Francisco has recently experienced an eight-fold rise in daily new reported Covid-19 cases. MORE