As concerns swirl about the potential danger of the omicron variant, President Joe Biden is ratcheting up several existing policies – and unveiling new measures – to fight COVID-19.
“We are pulling out all the stops to get people the maximum amount of protection as we head into winter months,” a senior administration told reporters Wednesday night.
Biden is expected to unveil a nine-prong plan on Thursday afternoon at the National Institutes of Health. Here are the highlights:
- Inbound international travelers – whether U.S. citizens or foreign nationals – will have to produce a negative COVID-19 test taken within one day of their departure. Previously, the time frame was three days.
- Mask wearing will be required on all airplanes, trains, and buses and at airports and transit system through mid-March. The existing mask mandate in those settings was set to expire in mid-January.
- Private health insurers will have to reimburse their customers for the expense of at-home COVID-19 testing kits. There are 150 million Americans with private health insurance.
- The administration will distribute 25 million at-home tests to community health centers and rural clinics, where there’s a concentration of people without private health insurance.
- The federal government will partner with the AARP to increase vaccine and booster outreach to seniors and children. NPR quips “You’re going to see a lot more ads for booster shots.”
- FEMA will launch ‘Family Mobile Vaccination Clinics’ so that adults and their children can get vaccinated simultaneously.
- The White House is calling on private employers to provide paid time off so their workers – or their dependent family members – can get vaccinated without fear of a reduced paycheck. Currently all federal workers receive that benefit, but the White House says 1/3 of workers in the private sector do not.
- The federal government is also in the process of securing 13 million doses of antiviral drugs, which would be enough to treat every American hospitalized with COVID-19 in 2021 six-times over. The drugs – from Merck and Pfizer – have yet to be granted full regulatory approval, but are widely expected to get the green light before the end of the year.
- Policies regarding school closures are also getting reconsidered. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been studying a new “test to stay” standard – where, according to the White House, “exposed students remain in school, wear masks, and test repeatedly in the days following exposure to identify and contain infection.” The CDC will likely release their findings on “test to say” within weeks.
- The White House also said “The President is committed to using every resource and tool available to the U.S. government to ensure that we can quickly get updated vaccines and boosters to the American people in the unlikely event they are needed to battle the Omicron variant.”
“While this new variant is a cause for concern, it is not a cause for panic,” a senior administration official told reporters Wednesday night. “We have the tools we need to confront [omicron], to keep making progress in our fight against the virus, and we are using these tools to keep people safe, keep our schools open and protect our economy.”
With Biden’s new policies, some experts think broad shutdowns will be unnecessary. Charity Dean, a former California health official and the CEO of the Public Health Company, explains why in The Washington Post:
“The reason why we had to do broad shutdowns and broad stay-at-home orders in March 2020 was because we were flying blind” and lacked information on the virus or how to fight it, Dean added. “Today … we can use the tools at our disposal to execute containment and mitigation with surgical precision.”