Gov. Jared Polis continued his commendable efforts this past weekend to keep COVID in perspective. As reported by The Gazette, the governor appeared Sunday on ABC’s national news program “This Week” and downplayed fears about the latest COVID variant to arrive in the U.S. and Colorado, the ominously named omicron.

The sinister, sci-fi sound of it almost invites panic. It’s actually just the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. This is in fact the 13th variant of COVID to crop up, but only delta had seemed newsworthy. It and the other previous variants were assigned the first 12 Greek letters, but researchers decided to skip the 13th and 14th – nu an xi – reportedly to avoid confusion in some languages. So, omicron it is. Scientists are like that. Really, it’s just a name.

An unfazed Polis told ABC he wasn’t “terribly alarmed,” as The Gazette noted.

“It is not yet at a level of community transmission in Colorado that we’re picking it up,” he said. “We have a few isolated cases, but we do regular wastewater screenings and it has not come up in that. We also screen around 15 to 20% of our tests. … If we had a high level of community transmission, we would know it.”

If – or when? – omicron proliferates like those that came before it, Polis nevertheless appears likely to stay the course on his overall COVID response of late. Notably, stressing vaccinations and boosters and deferring to local health departments on other measures like mask mandates. Just as well; local governments have a better grasp on COVID’s threat level in their midst – as well as on public sensibilities about how best to deal with it.

Which places Polis and Colorado somewhere in the middle of the states on the issue overall. It’s not as sweepingly self-assured as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ retort to the press last week: “We are not, in Florida, going to allow any media-driven hysteria to do anything to infringe people’s individual freedoms when it comes to any type of COVID variants.” But it’s also well short of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s recent declaration of a state of emergency.

Colorado’s latest COVID numbers do indeed serve to ease fears. By the lights of the New York Times’ state-by-state COVID tracker, our state’s daily average of new cases as of Sunday was down 23% from two weeks earlier. Hospitalizations across the state were down 4% in that time.

Yet again, COVID seems to be pursuing a path of its own, in some ways almost oblivious to public health measures taken to combat it. The governor appears to realize that and has been keeping a steady hand on the tiller – rather than trying, futilely, to counter the stubborn virus at every twist and turn.

Denver Gazette editorial board