Omicron and the Return to Normalcy

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Question of the Week

The holiday break is over for most. How should America’s colleges, high schools, and elementary schools handle the winter surge of COVID-19 cases associated with the Omicron variant? What do you like most or least about how your educational institution is handling the pandemic? What local details of interest can you share about how matters are being handled near you? As ever, my email address is conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

My first mental model of this pandemic took shape on February 24, 2020, when James Hamblin published “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus.” At the time, there were fewer than 100 known cases in the United States. Yet in his telling, 40 to 70 percent of humans would eventually get infected. Slowing COVID’s spread still made sense, to avoid overwhelming hospitals, but were countermeasures warranted beyond what was necessary to avoid swamping caregivers?

I thought that the right answer hinged on an unknown. “If we knew that a broadly effective COVID-19 treatment was imminent, or that a working vaccine was months away,” I wrote in May 2020, “minimizing infections through social distancing until that moment would be the right course.” But “if we will never have an effective treatment or vaccine and most everyone will get infected,” I continued, the costs would outweigh the benefits. I gambled that there would be a vaccine, or improved treatments, or both, and continued to take extreme, isolating precautions.