As we stand at the precipice of the New Year, we can’t but feel like we are in some sort of nightmare loop with the Omicron variant raging and New Jersey, once again in the top tier of states where the rate of infection is spiking.

While New Jersey has ranked highest in the nation and the world for per capita COVID death toll for most of the pandemic, we have now been eclipsed by Mississippi with 348 per 100,000 and Alabama 333 per hundred thousand. New Jersey now has 322 per 100,000, one more than Louisiana, currently number four.

There’s little consolation that as the New York Times reported the aggressive variant has now pushed “the global tally of new coronavirus cases…. passed one million per day on average” with “the previous global case record set last April has already been broken three times this week.”

“In the United States, where Omicron is spreading quickly, 16 states and Puerto Rico are at their all-time case records,” reported the Times. “These include states with comparatively high vaccination rates: Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island, all of which are at least 70 percent fully vaccinated. In addition to being more transmissible generally, Omicron also appears to give rise to more breakthrough infections.”

The Times has also reported that the initial indications from South Africa, where Omicron originated,  is that the highly contagious variant abated in a matter of weeks “with no big spike in deaths.”

Here in New Jersey, according to NJ.com, COVID hospitalizations have hit over 3,000, an 11-month-high but well below the 8,000 reported at the start of the pandemic. While deaths have been trending up, New Jersey’s current fatalities are in the dozens, not the over three hundred per day reported in the worst of the first phase.

Perhaps of greatest concern has been the proliferation of pediatric cases requiring hospitalization. “The number of kids hospitalized with COVID has more than doubled in 10 states” reported NBC News including in New Jersey and New York.

In New York City, NBC recounted half of the children hospitalized between Dec. 5 and Dec. 19 when cases rose “fourfold” were “younger than 5, meaning they are not eligible for a COVID vaccine.”

Statewide, here in New Jersey, according to press reports, COVID cases among New Jersey school students have spiked, up 155 percent since the week before Thanksgiving.

NJ.com reported that Dr. Kevin Slavin, interim chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the Joseph M. Sanzari Children’s Hospital at Hackensack University Medical Center, “said he’d seen a ‘huge increase’ in the number of recent pediatric hospitalizations die to COVID.”

Slavin told the news outlet “children hospitalized for COVID are not usually staying in the hospital for long stays” but warned “reports that the omicron variant is more mild shouldn’t be a cause for less caution…. even if proportionally fewer people infected with this variant go to the hospital, if there’s a larger total number of people infected, hospitals could still be swamped with cases.”

“On top of that, the long-term effects of COVID infections in children are not well known yet,” NJ.com cautions.

Throughout the pandemic our government’s response has been entirely defined by the scarcity model upon which our winner economy thrives that kept so many millions without basic health care coverage even before COVID started to killing hundreds of thousands.

First it was the lack of N-95 masks. Two years later, it’s COVID test kits that a desperate population cues up for.

Do you see a pattern here?

Then this week, the CDC, over the loud objection of America’s nurses’ unions buckled to corporate pressure and radically reduced the period of COVID quarantine from ten days down to five without the requirement for a negative test before workers could return to their jobs.

The move came after Delta Airlines wrote the CDC that it would have

trouble keeping planes in the air while maintaining the 10-day quarantine.

New Jersey’s largest health care union, the Health Professionals and Allied Employees union blasted the anti-worker move. There critique was echoed by nurses’ unions across the nation as well as by Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA.

“The COVID omicron variant has shown to be a highly contagious and infectious virus, as cases are quickly spiking, threatening to overwhelm the hospitals in our state,” HPAE said in a statement. “In fact, assistance from the National Guard and FEMA have already been solicited as some of our hospitals are already having difficulty meeting the demands of the increased census.”

The Washington Post reported that Dr. Michael Mina, a former Brigham and Women’s epidemiologist and an expert on rapid tests,  called the CDC failure to include a negative test in their guidance for COVID survivors to return to work was “reckless.”

“Some [people] stay infectious 3 days, some 12,” Mina wrote in a Twitter post, the newspaper recounted. “I absolutely don’t want to sit next to someone who turned [positive] 5 days ago and hasn’t tested [negative]. Test [negative] to leave isolation early is just smart.”

The CDC’s roll back of the COVID quarantine at the behest of employers, was not the first time where the nation’s top public health agency put its thumb on the public policy scale for commerce.

Back in May, over the objections of front-line unions, it ended the universal mask mandate for indoor public places for the vaccinated. At the time, the nurses and other essential worker unions warned that a sufficient number of people were not yet vaccinated, that the vaccinated could still transmit the virus, and that the premature rollback risk spawning a variant.

Hello Delta.

It was just a matter of several weeks until the CDC was back at their guidance etch a sketch, telling the public to check out their local county’s transmission rate. If it was ‘high’, as it was in every one of our 21 counties, they should go back to wearing the mask in indoor public settings, even if they were vaccinated.

The damage was done. Thanks to President Trump’s initial strategy of pitting red states versus blue states and belittling basic public health behaviors like mask wearing, public health precautions have been hopelessly politicized.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, Gov. Murphy  once again, opted to vacation out of the country despite a U.S. State Department COVID advisory that Americans “reconsider” their plans. The agency cited a CDC Level 3 warning that “because of the current situation in Costa Rica, all travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19 variants.”

This Christmas shopping season out and about in Monmouth County I saw signs reading on shop windows that read “Welcome! Face masks are optional!”

Evidently, so is spreading COVID.

Any wonder we’re stuck?