THE WHITE HOUSE BRACES FOR IMPACT — Since Thanksgiving night, the Biden administration has watched as the Omicron variant seeded within the U.S. — and then fueled an unprecedented surge of Covid-19 infections across the country. As if that weren’t bad enough, officials fear the next few weeks could be a whole lot worse, Adam and POLITICO’s Chris Cadelago report. The White House is bracing for soaring rates of Omicron to swamp the nation, threatening to strain hospitals, complicate travel and disrupt swathes of the economy. Infections are already topping 1 million a day, with hospitalizations on the rise and schools and businesses facing staff shortages. The crisis has spurred a race within the administration to avert breakdowns in critical services — with officials shifting from trying to contain the virus itself to simply trying to manage its reverberations. The White House is dispatching federal personnel to overwhelmed hospitals, expanding testing sites and urging states to keep their schools open. On Tuesday, Biden pleaded with Americans to get vaccinated and boosted, arguing the U.S. has the tools to weather the surge if only, “for God’s sake,” people would take advantage of them. It’s an emergency unlike the pandemic’s prior flare-ups. This time last year, most Americans didn’t have vaccines to protect them. And unlike Delta, Omicron appears to be less vicious — a relief for health experts who have closely watched the nation’s death rate. But the nation is more divided and exhausted by Covid-19 than ever before. Lockdowns are off the table. Vaccines and masks are deeply politicized. The central threat, meanwhile, is less that hospitals will run out of beds than that they will run out of healthy doctors and nurses. The White House now hopes the CDC’s reduced isolation guidelines will help alleviate worker shortages, and officials have spent much of their time in recent weeks on expanding testing and supporting the needs of state-level responses. There’s also a silver lining the administration is clinging to: Indications abroad that Omicron could burn out as fast as it arrived. Yet until then, Biden will remain mired in a pandemic that he’d once hoped to defeat within months — a burden already weighing on his approval ratings and likely to jeopardize his party’s hold on Washington come November. GOP GOVS BLAST COVID ‘HYSTERIA,’ STILL WANT HELP — While the White House tries to hold together the nation’s health system, Republican governors are grappling with a more political dilemma: Whether to dismiss the Omicron threat as blue-state hysteria or ask for the help actually needed on the ground. For several high-profile GOP leaders, the answer is both, POLITICO’s Gary Fineout and Arek Sarkissian report. Governors in states like Florida, Texas, Nebraska and Georgia have ruled out lockdowns and mandates, dismissing the rise in cases and downplaying any cause for concern. Yet at the same time, they’re calling on Biden to do more to rein in the pandemic — and demanding greater supplies of the therapeutics needed to treat Covid-19. “Bogarting these treatments like that and not putting them out is wrong,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said, before later saying that in the face of the Omicron surge, “it’s not justifiable to let fear overwhelm you.” The shifting rhetoric highlights the fine line GOP governors are trying to walk when it comes to Covid-19 in an effort to simultaneously manage the public health crisis and position themselves as potential presidential challengers. That’s been complicated in places like Florida, where the state ranked third in infection rate last week. A handful of governors have responded by focusing primarily on access to monoclonal antibody treatments — even though initial studies suggest they may not be effective against Omicron. After the federal government suspended shipment of two types of the treatments, DeSantis and others leveled criticism at Biden over the decision. HHS has since relented, sending Florida 30,000 doses in the past three weeks — a supply that comes on top of the 33,000 the state had already stockpiled. | 
