Biden Drops the Ball Fighting against Omicron Surge in the U.S.

^{COVID At-home Test Kit / Travis Wise / San Jose, California / Flickr / December 23, 2020 / CC BY 2.0}

With the rapid spread of the Omicron Coronavirus across the globe, several governments have chosen to reimpose restrictions before the holiday season began, and many are not loosening up as we ring in 2022. 

The strain has been deemed more infectious than earlier strains, despite the fact that it does not cause as severe of a reaction as the delta variant. 

These concerns have raised many questions for countries that have to now re-evaluate their plans to attempt to halt the spread. 

Naturally, the Biden Administration is handling the situation like the turtle’s they are; slowly and as if there is no problem. 

Biden announced in an address to the country that he was planning new measures to combat the winter surge by shipping half a billion at-home tests out – however welcome they may be, they are still way too late on the government’s part. 

Despite the overwhelming surge of Omicron across the country, Biden still denies that his administration has failed to adequately prepare for this wave of cases. 

His plan is to distribute approximately 500 million at-home COVID test kits, which Anne Rimoin – a UCLA professor of epidemiology – has said “[is] late in coming and will be a small drop in the bucket compared to the tsunami of cases on the horizon.”

Until now, Biden’s main focus has been forcing the vaccine down everyone’s throats and instigating several strict mandates across several important fields such as travel and medical. Not only is there now a shortage of skilled medical workers that are equipped to handle this surge in cases, but Biden can’t even admit it. 

The tests that the administration has promised to administer will begin in January, and equate to about 1 or 2 per resident, which is not enough for proper testing. 

It seems as if Biden has set us up for disaster, first encouraging people to gather during the holidays so long as they were vaccinated and took precautions… while warning people that there was a fast-spreading variant getting even the vaccinated infected. 

Galit Alter, an immunologist, and virologist affiliated with the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, M.I.T., and Harvard, was quick to warn everyone of the severity of Omicron, despite the general public’s frustration with yet another wave of the pandemic. 

“This is an incredibly contagious pathogen, and we don’t know yet its impact on severity and death,” he said. “We have to re-establish the importance and rigor of the first wave,” she added. “We are back in ‘flatten the curve’ mode.”