In Chicago, where the county’s Covid warning level was raised to “high” last week, the city’s top doctor said there was no reason for residents to let the virus control their lives. The state health director in Louisiana likened a new rise in Covid cases there to a downpour — “a surge within a surge” — but characterized the situation as concerning but not alarming.

And the public health officer in King County, Wash., Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, said on Thursday that officials were discussing reissuing a mask mandate but would prefer that the public mask up voluntarily. “We’re not going to be able to have infinite series of mandates forcing people to do this, that and the other,” he said…

“I feel strongly that you can’t just kind of cry wolf all the time,” said Dr. Allison Arwady, the commissioner of the Chicago health department, who said she will wait to see whether hospitals become strained before considering another citywide mask mandate. “I want to save the requirements around masks or updating vaccine requirements for when there’s a significant change.”

Complicating the country’s understanding of this BA.5 wave is a dearth of data. Not since the earliest months of the pandemic has there been so little precise information about the number of actual infections in the United States. As public testing sites have closed and at-home testing — if people test at all — has grown common, the publicly reported data has become scarce and spotty.