America doesn’t much care about COVID-19 anymore. Just Ask Kamala Harris

WASHINGTON—The vice-president of the United States has COVID-19.

Ho-hum. Carry on. For now, at least.

When the White House announced Kamala Harris’ health status on Tuesday, the terse five-sentence statement from her press secretary, Kirsten Allen, encapsulated something of the current US coronavirus posture neatly.

“Today, Vice President Harris tested positive for COVID-19 on rapid and PCR tests. She has exhibited no symptoms, will isolate and continue to work from the vice president’s residence, ”the statement began her. She said she hadn’t recently had close contact with the president due to travel schedules.

There were immediate news alerts, but the cable news channels didn’t turn to the Veep’s diagnosis for long before returning to Ukraine, Alec Baldwin, and Elon Musk buying Twitter.

That relative shrug at Harris’ news mirrors the broader approach to the COVID situation, in which the virus continues to circulate in the US, clearly even among the vaccinated and boosted. In DC within the past six weeks, the list of movers and shakers who’ve contracted the illness after all of this time includes the Speaker of the House of Representativesthe mayor of washingtonand the president’s press secretary (for a second time). But mask requirements in most places are all but a memory, freely available at-home antigen tests have largely begun replacing official PCR testing for most suspected cases, and isolation protocols have been greatly relaxed. For weeks, Congress has been delaying passage of renewed funding to fight COVID.

“We are in a complicated moment in the pandemic,” White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha wrote in a CNN oped that urged renewed funding and was circulated by the White House this week. “Infections, while low, are rising again in many parts of the country — driven by a new and more transmissible subvariant of Omicron, known as BA.2,” he wrote. “While deaths are declining, hundreds of Americans are still dying from COVID-19 each day.” He warned against the impulse to “think the pandemic is over.”

Yet clearly, authorities are eager not to dwell on it any more, either — it has dropped off as a public topic of daily discussion in the White House, and new or revived restrictions aren’t really up for discussion. Much (but not all) of the public is with them on that.

You can certainly see a change in tone and sense of alarm from the last time an elected member of the executive branch tested positive — when a death watch agreed at the Walter Reed Hospital and media parsed the details of a White House superspreader event where he may have contracted or given it to those around him.

Part of the difference now — in Harris’ case and more generally — is the widespread availability and efficacy of vaccines in preventing hospitalizations and death. And among the unvaccinated, the incidence of some immunity from prior infection is high — according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) , by February of this year, more than 60 per cent of Americans had been infected with coronavirus at least once.

Likely because of the combination of those two factors, US hospitalizations are at their lowest level since the pandemic’s beginning in March 2020, and deaths have continued to drop despite a rise in infections in the northeast part of the country.

So there has been no rush with the recent Omicron variant to return to prevention precautions. The White House is appealing a court ruling that struck down the mandate on airplanes and public transit — but widespread reporting suggests the appeal has more to do with the precedent set by the decisionand that mandates won’t be reimposed in the case of victory.

The White House continues to push, at every opportunity, the message that people should get vaccinated and boosted, though it appears that message may be a matter of preaching to a well-rehearsed choir at this point. Since early February, the number of two-dose vaccinated Americans (about two-thirds) has barely budged and the percentage increased (30 per cent) has risen only a smidge.

And while the Biden administration is distributing millions of free at-home antigen tests and high-quality N95 masks to the public (in our neighborhood, households can pick up boxes of both at the local library each day), much of its emphasis is moving from individual efforts at prevention to mass detection through wastewater monitoring and, especially, to treatment.

On Tuesday morning, the Biden administration announced it was increasing the supply of the antiviral drug Paxlovid available free to the public (which, in a briefing call, a senior administration official said reduced the risk of hospitalization and death by 90 per cent) and is ramping up a “test to treat” program in which high-risk people can get a test and, if necessary, a doctor visit and antiviral pill all in one visit, for free.

Less worry about containing the virus, it appears, and more focus on containing the damage it causes.

The final sentences of the announcement of Harris’ diagnosis reflected a sense this would soon pass. “She will follow CDC guidelines and the advice of her physicians. The vice president will return to the White House when she tests negative.”

And what about the 79-year-old president? At the White House press briefing Tuesday, Dr. Jha said that while Harris had no recent contact with Biden, “I wouldn’t say it’s just a matter of time, but of course it is possible that the president, like any other American, could get COVID. The bottom line is he is vaccinated and boosted, he is very well protected, he’s got very good protocols around him to protect him from getting infected. But there is not 100 per cent anything.”

Carry on, then. For now, at least.

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