The coronaviruses death has been overstated. In the United States, the Pandemic is still going on in vaccine and unvaccinated areas. President Biden declared on the Fourth of July that the nation was nearing independence from COVID-19, but five months later the virus is still here.
The arrival of the new Omicron variant and the Delta strain has led to public confusion, which is made worse by pervasive exhaustion.
It's possible that some of that has to do with confused messaging, but also with the fact that public health authorities are confused as well. Questions about Omicron have not been answered. Conflicting guidance has arisen because of the inability to make definitive assertions and the need to say something.
Gary L. Kreps, a health communications scholar at George Mason University, told Yahoo News that many members of the public are suffering from information overload. They are confused and shell-shocked.
There are a number of ways in which those feelings are being played out. Football fans in the Buffalo, N.Y., area recently received conflicting messages about whether they needed to be vaccine free to attend a game.
There was a controversy about vaccinations and masks, as questions persisted about a local school district that was giving students masks in the middle of the school day, which undermined the point of masking in the first place.
It would make sense if everyone got on the same page.
Getting on the same page is becoming more difficult for elected leaders, public health officials and ordinary people. Public health officials have learned a lot about how to control the virus in the last two years. The Omicron variant of the vaccine has greater potential for immunity escape than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine, so should three shots be added to the vaccine? A government health committee ruled against a fourth shot for Israel.
Vaccines are not the only point of contention. Should masks be required? Should businesses and schools be closed again?
A pharmacy in New York City is selling vaccinations. Spencer Platt is pictured.
Dr. Bob Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told Yahoo News in an email that there are about 10 swirling cross-currents. Two years' worth of Covid exhaustion is on top of that. Two years ago, this was a novel coronaviruses, but it is long gone.
In the first year of the Pandemic, vaccines, masks and other measures are subject to the same political, cultural and scientific crosscurrents. Some people have thrown caution to the wind. The psychologist Adam Grant wrote in the New York Times that many people have been conditioned to stop fearing COVID-19 because of the many false alarms they have been through.
Omicron focused on the Pandemic and gave officials the chance to remind the public about Delta, a variant that had been forgotten. Delta is a clear and present danger, with 1,000 deaths a day in the U.S., a number that should produce outrage but which seems to elicit a ho-hum reaction.
The best way to protect against Omicron is to get a booster shot, which is why Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Dr. Anthony Fauci recommend it. The number of people getting a booster dose has gone up, but first-dose take-up has gone down.
Health care workers tend to a COVID-19 patient at Providence St. Mary Medical Center in Apple Valley, Calif. A picture ofAriana Drehsler/AFP.
Only 17 percent of the American population is fully protected for the winter if boosters are the best protection in the months to come. Most of the world's other countries haven't even started offering a third shot, which means that the coronaviruses will continue to flourish, ending lives and disrupting them, while potentially giving rise to new variant.
In the midst of all this, people are trying to make risk calculations about whether it is safe to travel, whether they need to plan for a return to the office, or whether schools will stay open.
American public health officials have been trying to assure the public that there won't be new lockdowns. The president said that schools should stay open, in a signal to the teachers' unions, which could push to close them as they did in 2020. Biden's popularity is dropping, a sign that there is no end in sight to the epidemic. The president promised to restore responsible, science-based guidance, but the Oval Office can't keep a pathogen away from where it wants to go.
Even the most knowledgeable authorities can't say much given the uncertainties and challenges of the present moment. The message of the White House and public health officials has been consistent since Biden took office, according to Michael X. Delli Carpini, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania. The messages about vaccines, masks and appropriate risk have not changed for months.
Carmen Penaloza received a dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at a pop-up clinic. Frederic J. Brown is pictured.
The problem is that the message is being sent in an environment in which multiple other voices are sending different and misleading messages, leading to confusion, distrust and partisan divides.
Republicans have been blamed by Democrats for prolonging the Pandemic, while Biden has been blamed by Republicans. The White House lambasted Kevin McCarthy, an ally of former President Donald Trump, for "actively undermining the fight against COVID."
McCarthy is not the only one. Last week, another Trump ally promoted a treatment. The usual round of debunks and fact-checks followed, but once Johnson's false claim hit the internet, there was no stopping it.
Most epidemiologists agree that the most realistic goal is to turn the epidemic into an epidemic, which is marked by quiescent periods and spikes. According to the CDC, there are more than 100,000 new cases per day in the United States. Deaths have gone up.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on Dec. 7. Alex Brandon is in the pool.
What long-term living with the coronaviruses will look like, whether masking will become a regular practice, whether booster shots will become the norm, and whether schools will stay open are all unknowns. It's not clear if restaurants, movie theaters, and other entertainment venues can survive the unpredictable cycle of reopenings and restrictions.
The Atlantic ran a headline that said, "America has lost the plot on covert action." The fight against the Delta variant was complicated by the Omicron variant, which is a more transmissible strain. The twin assaults complicate the messaging of public health officials, which in turn complicates the calculations of ordinary Americans who had been hoping to resume normal life by now.
Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, wrote in an email newsletter that recent developments, such as the rise of Omicron, were upending what she had hoped would be a new sense of normal.
Most of the questions I hear are not about the medical details of Omicron. The angst is bigger. Feelings of fear and anxiety were renewed by the variant. Will we ever be able to plan a vacation?
A man is getting a test for COVID-19 at the Los Angeles International Airport in December 2020. The images are by Mario Tama.
The arrival of the Delta variant has caused confusion for months. It began in the spring according to Dr. Leana Wen, a former Baltimore health commissioner. The CDC revised its guidance on masks on May 13 because of the falling cases.
They never recovered from their disastrous communication in May that opened the door to Delta. After the mask mandate was lifted, a coronaviruses cluster in Massachusetts, which is home to the United States, alert public health authorities to the presence of Delta in the United States and its heightened ability to spread.
By the end of July, masks were back, and the anxiety that seemed to have dissipated in the first half of the summer had returned. Republican governors decided to challenge school-based mask mandates after they had been threatening a fight with Biden. Many governors would challenge Biden's vaccine mandate for private employers.
The Food and Drug Administration and other agencies fought over whether booster shots were necessary. Some argued that vaccine doses should be shipped off to other nations, while others pointed to data showing that protection against Delta was significantly increased by a third shot.
At a clinic in San Rafael, Calif., in October, a pharmacist filled a needle with a vaccine. The images were taken by Justin Sullivan.
Both arguments were endorsed by Omicron. Boosters do work against the variant, but it will still happen in low-vaccine regions. The Biden administration insists that vaccine delivery is the main challenge there.
Where does the ordinary person go?
Wachter says that he studies this for a living and tries to make a rational choice about whether to go out to dinner in a restaurant or fly to visit his mom in Florida. I can only imagine how it feels for people with other day jobs, or who don't think about medical decision making or Bayesian reasoning for a living.
Wachter suggests that the best thing you can do is to find a few experts that you trust.
The caption will look like this.
The discovery of the Omicron coronaviruses variant has sparked basic questions for people who are exhausted by the efforts of Delta and the earlier variant. Dr. Monica Gandhi is an infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco.
