Social distancing and self-quarantining have spiked in recent weeks as Omicron puts the nation in a crouch like last spring before vaccines became widely available, according to the latest installment of the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index.
36% of vaccinated survey respondents who have tested positive for the virus or think they’ve had it now say they were infected after being fully vaccinated. That compares with 22% in mid-December, and just 6% last summer.
Nearly nine-in-10 now say they know someone who’s gotten COVID.
We all know or have heard stories about people saying they’d like to just get it over with and get Omicron because it sounds milder than earlier strains.
But the survey results suggest most Americans are worried about Omicron and modifying their behavior to try to minimize exposure and spread.
They also suggest a possible reason for that fear: vaccines aren’t as effective in stopping infections as they used to be before Omicron. (Health officials emphasize that they do significantly decrease the risk of hospitalization and death.)
“It’s ‘America retrenches,'” said Cliff Young, president of Ipsos U.S. Public Affairs. “People all of a sudden are being assaulted again by the virus and therefore they’re changing. And if they’re not, somebody very close to them is.”
“The shifts are so significant across the board,” said Ipsos vice president Mallory Newall. They represent “a revert back to basically last April when people were bunkering because a majority weren’t vaccinated yet.”
A combined 52% of all respondents now say they believe it will be more than a year — or never — before they can return to their normal, pre-COVID lives. That’s the highest since we began asking this question nearly a year ago.
About three-fourths said they feel they face as great a risk or more risk of contracting the virus now than in the spring of 2020.
30% of the unvaccinated said Omicron makes them more likely to get the vaccine, a jump from 19% who said so when we asked in December.
By the numbers: Three-fourths of respondents in the latest wave of our national survey say they’ve received the vaccine. But there’s broad public awareness that even being fully vaccinated and boosted isn’t stopping breakthroughs of this strain.
57% said they socially distanced in the last week, up from 45% last month and the highest level since last April.
13% said they self-quarantined, up from 8% last month and the highest since last April.
46% went out to eat, down from 54% last month and the lowest since last April.
50% visited family and friends, down from 60% last month and the lowest since last March.
More people also reported working from home and being required to wear masks in the workplace.
The share of Americans saying they took a COVID test in the past week was up from December, but not dramatically: 17% compared with 13%.
14% said they’ve tried to get an at-home test in the past few weeks but couldn’t find one.
10% said they tried to get a professional to give them a test but couldn’t get an appointment.
Here’s the best thing I’ve read about the situation in the schools, which tracks closely with what I’ve heard anecdotally:
This latest, highly contagious variant has caused widespread teacher, support staff, and student outages, making it difficult for even the new normal of school (masked, with occasional class quarantines) to persist. And so, whether schools should be open or closed has yet again become a fight about public health, education, and the future of children’s well-being in America.
For one high school student, though, the issue is much more practical. COVID “has completely taken over any function of daily school life,” wrote a sophomore in a Reddit post last week, titled “I Am a New York City Public High School Student. The Situation is Beyond Control.” The post quickly went viral for its level of detail on what school is actually like right now. (The student asked to remain anonymous, so we’ll call him Josh, after his Reddit handle. But we confirmed his identity.) In the post, he describes how his week after winter break was upended by teacher absences, as cases in the city hit an all-time high. The school day is filled with empty classes and extra study hall periods in which students gather in an auditorium where there is “functionally no learning occurring.” (After the second study hall in a row, Josh and some of his peers realized that the “health conditions were safer outside of the auditorium” and left.)
We spoke to Josh on Saturday about how omicron has changed things at his high school, what he wishes administrators would do right now, and what it’s like to have peers test positive during the school day itself. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Advertisement
Slate: What do you hope people get out of reading your Reddit post?
Josh: One of the intents was to, I wouldn’t say laugh, but just recognize a certain level of absurdity in the way that school is being managed right now. I think the most important thing is that when people look at the issue of closing schools, they’re really only looking at the health side of it. It’s a black-and-white discussion—people are either saying “you’re risking students’ health” or “it’s just idiotic to close schools.” It seems that there’s little nuance. But just with the sheer volume of cases, it makes it impossible for there to be actual learning conditions at school.
In the post, and in your tone right now, you sound pretty lighthearted. Are you worried about COVID?
I think some students have a feeling of fear about COVID, in general. For me personally, I had COVID recently, so I suppose in some respects I’m immune to it.
I don’t mean to be lighthearted. I think it’s serious, but I can’t help it because I think there’s just a certain sense of absurdity. I know a student who had six study hall free periods yesterday, and they only had three classes. And in their classes, 50 percent of the students were out. And so for them, it’s just, why did they come to school? Why are they risking health, risking the fact of potentially getting COVID when they could choose to be just not going to school or schools couldn’t be open?
How much of your high school experience has happened during the pandemic, and how has it changed since March 2020?
All of it. In ninth grade, I was on Zoom the entire year. This year, I’d say that other than wearing masks, before this past week, COVID almost felt unnoticeable. Even wearing masks feels normal at this point. You do a health screening every day. When you enter school, you have to show that you haven’t had COVID. But other than that, it felt—nobody ever got COVID. Maybe once a month one student got COVID. But now it’s been a big, big deal.
What are the conversations with your peers like right now?
Before break, I rarely heard COVID talked about ever. Now, nearly every single conversation starts with talking about how we find it absurd that we’re in school. I’d say in the hallway, when I see people I know, the first question anybody asks is, how many study halls did you have? How many something-related-to-COVID did you have today? Everything seems to revolve around it, especially this week.
One of the most striking parts of your Reddit post is the fact that kids are testing themselves at school and getting positive results at school. Can you tell me what that’s like?
There were two moments I wrote about. One was during fourth period, a student tested positive in the auditorium. I didn’t have fourth period study hall at that time, but I heard it from numerous, numerous students who said that people were testing positive with or sharing their positivity within the front of the auditorium, which is just, to me, that’s very concerning.
Then in the hallway and the staircase, a student asked if their faint line was a positive test. It was very jarring because I thought everybody would know that a faint line is a positive test. Interestingly enough, that student ended up actually being negative, but they got a false positive test. That’s another layer. How well are the rapid tests working? How reputable are they? So I think it’s just jarring and scary in general.
I have this sensation often that I’ve had to become a mini epidemiologist in my own life, to figure out what’s going on with cases and tests and everything around me. And I’m getting that sense from you too.
I try, but I’m busy. I read a lot of news pre–2020 election. Honestly I’ve tailed off in what I read about COVID. I think I need to get back into trying to be a little more of an epidemiologist because I didn’t know that they had approved boosters for students ages 12 to 15 on Monday. I learned at school. So I need to work on that a little.
If you had the power right now to do whatever you want with opening school, closing school, setting up Zoom school, making snow days or COVID days where you don’t have to do anything, what would your proposal be?
My suggestion would be to close school for a week. In terms of within school itself, I think teachers are doing the best that they can at enforcing health and trying to give students material to learn on. But with just the sheer amount of people that are out and the number of kids that are out, they’re dealt a deck which is just impossible to manage.
It just seems like if cases keep rising, it’s just going to get worse and worse. Not even in terms of health-related issues. No one’s really getting severely sick. Just in terms of learning loss.
Smart kid. Everyone should pay attention.
Nobody is learning anything in these schools in places where there is high community spread. So the argument that they are being deprived of their instruction is spurious. And schools certainly aren’t the “safest place for kids” because the schools are crawling with COVID and even if they don’t personally get too ill, they are potentially going to expose their families and it is definitely not safe for kids to have sick parents. If the parents are unvaccinated, they could lose them.