#Sense and science are finally triumphing on COVID restrictions

All of a sudden, good sense is breaking out everywhere when it comes to COVID precautions.

On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control finally admitted the obvious: Anyone who’s fully vaccinated doesn’t need to mask or social distance except when indoors in a crowd — an admission that will make it far easier for people to get back to work and school.

More remarkable still, American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten came all-out in favor of reopening schools — though only in the fall and with other dubious caveats, such as a supposed need for universal masking and social distancing.

She insists this isn’t “risk-free,” although neither she nor anyone else can be sure what things will look like by Labor Day: Current trends certainly suggest transmissions will be vanishingly small by then.

Even so, her forthright words — “the United States will not be fully back until we are fully back in schools . . . and my union is all-in” — represent a major shift from her recent claims that remote learning is an adequate substitute, rather than a total disaster.

In fact, Weingarten made it obvious that her main concern is the growing public fury at teachers’ unions over their all-out opposition to reopenings by saying: “Critics have scapegoated teachers and vilified their unions because of the school closures during the pandemic, ignoring the extreme disparities among schools and blaming teachers for problems outside their control.”

Just who has scapegoated teachers? That was a red herring, along with her bid to scapegoat the Trump administration for sowing “chaos and misinformation” early in the pandemic.

Then, too, endorsing a reopening in the next school year avoids the burning question of why any schools (those not in the few remaining hot spots, anyway) are still closed now. She may also be looking to distract from the news that her union and the National Education Association somehow managed to dictate key language in the CDC’s restrictive guidance on school reopenings — which actually contradicted what CDC chief Dr. Rochelle Walensky had been saying previously.

As best we can tell, the AFT hasn’t yet given the CDC the go-ahead to drop that pseudo-science, but at least Weingarten’s concessions suggest the rules will ease by the fall.

In short: Reality-based policy may be triumphing only by kicks and starts, but at least it’s still progress.