New variant emerges as will for more rules wanes

Cold weather is driving more Americans indoors. The holiday season brings a wave of travel, generating new lines of COVID-19 transmission. The delta variant is pushing up hospitalizations. And now an ominous new variant has emerged: omicron.

But after nearly 21 months of pandemic restrictions, there is little appetite in the country for the kinds of school closures, indoor-gathering bans and restaurant restrictions that defined the early days of the disease, according to health officials, who say the political will to push for unpopular — but effective — mitigation measures is waning.

"It is very exhausting," said Ezekiel Emanuel, a physician and bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who was on President Joe Biden's coronavirus advisory team during the transition. "The American public is rightfully exhausted, and therefore the amount of risk we're willing to take goes up. People are willing to take more risks and accept more challenges, but they're not willing to accept more restrictions."

But he suggested that a resistance to such limitations carries its own dangers. "How often do you hear people say, 'I'm done with COVID?' Well, your being done with it does not mean the pandemic is over," Emanuel said.

The landscape could change as scientists learn more about omicron and how much protection the current vaccines provide against it. But public health officials, from White House staffers to county leaders, have shown little desire to once again take disruptive measures, instead pushing Americans to voluntarily change their behavior without punitive threats.

In some places including Iowa, even if health officials did want to enact new restrictions, their power to do so has been stripped as Republican governors and GOP-controlled state legislatures have moved to curtail their powers.

The president gave his first formal update about the new variant Monday from the White House, stressing that it was "a cause for concern, not a cause for panic."

He urged Americans to get vaccinated and, if eligible, to get a booster shot, saying medical experts believe the coronavirus vaccines provide "at least some protection against the new variant and that boosters strengthen that protection significantly."

Biden also encouraged Americans to wear a mask indoors and in crowded places, but said he does not anticipate the need for lockdowns or additional travel restrictions. "If people are vaccinated and wear their mask, there's no need for lockdown," he said.

The president said he would lay out a detailed strategy Thursday for how the United States will fight the virus over the winter. The plan, he said, would focus on increasing testing and vaccination rates.

Over the weekend, Biden restricted travel from southern African nations in an attempt to slow the spread of the new variant to the country, although health officials have said the omicron variant is probably already circulating in the United States.

Biden's top aides have been clear recently — before omicron was detected — that stricter measures were not under consideration amid a persistent delta-driven wave. In the last week, COVID-19-related hospitalizations have risen by about 5 percent, even as new cases and deaths dipped.

As of Monday, the omicron variant had not been verified in the United States, though it had entered some European countries. While omicron has a high number of mutations that could suggest greater transmissibility, scientists have not yet determined how large a threat it poses.

For Biden, who is struggling with low approval ratings, any resurgence of pandemic worries could further drag down his popularity and undercut a central promise of his presidency: to restore the country to normalcy.

In the early summer, before the delta wave took hold, 89 percent of Americans said they thought the virus situation was getting better, according to a Gallup poll. That plummeted by July, although it rose to 51 percent saying the situation was getting better in September.

If there is a major resurgence of the pandemic, the political will for the harshest virus mitigation measures has largely evaporated even in the most liberal parts of the country, which have been the most open to restrictions, experts say.

"The threshold to shut things down is going to be much higher than it was," said Robert Wachter, who chairs the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. "One of the durable take-away lessons is that the closing of schools is really a terrible thing to do and should be avoided at all costs."

Wachter said that, if omicron proves as dangerous as some health officials fear, there will probably be a more regional approach to restrictions, with places like California and East Coast states tightening rules while states in the Midwest and South take a more relaxed approach.

"There is a general zeitgeist in other parts of the country of 'we're over it,' " Wachter said. "Politicians are over it. … I think it's going to sort itself by region and probably by political persuasion."