Erica Grieder: A highly transmissible, less-deadly COVID variant should lead us to revisit questions about pandemic precautions

When I asked Professor Bryan Edward Stone how he was feeling about the upcoming spring semester, he sighed. “Unprepared?” he offered, after a few moments. “At this point I don’t know what I’m doing.” He teaches American history at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi—which has done what it can to protect students, staff and faculty from COVID-19 over the past two years, despite the necessary trade-offs, and the various ways that the state of Texas has tied its hands. There are no vaccine mandates, or mask mandates, on campus. But class enrollment has been capped at half-capacity. Students have the option to attend lectures online, rather than in person. For the fall semester, at least, professors had the option to do all their teaching online, at least for a few weeks-a precaution inspired by the surge in COVID cases last summer, driven by the Delta variant. It remains to be seen whether the college will adopt a similar policy now that we’re in another surge, this one fueled by the omicron variant.

Stone sounded a wistful note, when he reminisced about teaching in 2020, the beginning of the pandemic. Restrictions were more sweeping, at that point—instruction was entirely online, for example—but at least everyone expected that, and was able to plan accordingly. “I thought that actually went pretty well,” he reflected, before adding a caveat: “It was the first year of COVID, and everyone was cooperative and collegial about it.” That’s an important disclaimer, for sure. Any esprit de corps Americans might have experienced early in the pandemic dissipated long ago, and the arrival of the omicron variant has not revived it. If anything, the opposite. This particular variant is giving Americans on both sides of the COVID debate—let’s call them COVID skeptics and COVID realists—cause to double down on their respective political positions. The new variant is highly transmissible, to the point that it’s causing breakthrough infections among the vaccinated and boosted. But it’s seemingly not as dangerous as the variants that preceded it. Consider what’s happening in the Houston region, although the surge is a nationwide one.