The altered guidance, ambiguous research findings and continuing unknowns about omicron — and, perhaps most of all, the overwhelming desire after two years of a pandemic to return to normal life — have left people once again in the predicament of making personal risk calculations that may be not terribly better than wild guesses.

Those calculations can take into account increasing evidence that omicron, the variant causing the majority of new infections, is less likely to cause severe illness, Anthony S. Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser for the pandemic, said Wednesday in an interview with The Post.

“It may turn out that omicron, at least among those who are vaccinated and/or previously infected, is going to turn out to be more of a bothersome upper-respiratory infection than something that causes the degree of morbidity and mortality that we’ve seen with other viruses,” Fauci said.

But for people who are unvaccinated and have not been infected previously, he cautioned, “It is not going to be just a common cold.”