Omicron seems to be everywhere now. So do all the worst ideas about the COVID pandemic

The most virulent responses to the coronavirus, from government abdication to vaccine resistance, have been with us as long as the pandemic. The difference today is that, as with the increasingly ubiquitous virus, we’re all giving in to them.

The rate of confirmed coronavirus infections in Sacramento County, undoubtedly an understatement of the actual figure, reached a pandemic record last week. The unprecedented surge brought renewed public health precautions, but they felt like a last, halfhearted gasp.

The county did order proof of vaccination or a negative test for “mega-events,” those involving at least hundreds of people, and require local governments to eschew in-person meetings — which plenty of public officials are too happy to do in any case. But its public health officer, Dr. Olivia Kasirye, told reporters she planned no further precautions while repeatedly encouraging residents to “do their own individual risk assessment” — which sounds a lot like Stephen Colbert’s recent satire of a CDC advisory: “Hey, man, you do you.”

Sacramento is not an anomaly. Cases are skyrocketing nationwide, including in San Francisco and some of the other most vaccinated parts of the country. Like the resurgence that accompanied the delta variant, this one is being widely attributed to omicron, which appears to evade immunity better than its predecessors. What’s perpetually underplayed is that it’s also fueled by our ever more widespread and determined return to normal activity.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recent shortening or elimination of isolation and quarantine periods took stock of this reality and shrugged. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration attempted to signal slightly more caution by advising people to be tested before emerging from newly curtailed quarantines — you know, with one of those tests no one can get. Herd immunity, a surrender disguised as a strategy incubated in the dim corners of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the Trump administration, has gone mainstream.

It’s not the only misbegotten notion going viral. President Joe Biden, who campaigned on the suddenly novel idea that the federal government should take responsibility for a national emergency, sounded troublingly Trumpian when he told governors recently that there was “no federal solution” to the pandemic. Though the comment was in the context of Biden’s broader acceptance of federal responsibility, it had a disturbing ring amid a wave of infections threatening to swamp his claims to competence.

With a majority of the population vaccinated, the idea of a laissez-faire approach is less stupid than it used to be. As a decoupling of case rates and the intensive care burden is showing, the overwhelming majority of vaccinated people face relatively mild illness that doesn’t, on its own, justify shutting anything down or shutting anyone in a bedroom for two weeks — even less so because boosters and a tamer variant further lower the risk, particularly for the vaccinated.

The trouble is that so many still aren’t. Over 8 million Californians — more than one in five — haven’t received a single dose. While vaccinated people’s patience with some of them has grown justifiably short, they’re not all deluded dead-enders who must be surrendered to the arbitrary judgment of a microbe.

Some are just moderately misled, hesitant or irresponsible and therefore failed by local, state, federal and corporate refusal to impose effective vaccine mandates for work, school, travel and recreation, which have consistently proved effective in dramatically boosting vaccination. The vast distance between the committed and casual vaccination holdout can be illustrated by the actual threat of being fired, expelled or otherwise excluded from society.

Some of the rest now at greatest risk are immunocompromised, disabled or otherwise unable to obtain or benefit from a vaccine. And some — including more than a quarter of California’s unvaccinated — are babies and toddlers who aren’t yet eligible for vaccination.

We could have protected these vulnerable fellow humans with a measure of social responsibility and courageous policymaking, but we didn’t. The current course of the contagion, both actual and cognitive, suggests it’s too late.