“When you’ve said the same thing over and over about being vaccinated, being boosted, that if you’re vulnerable and you’re indoors with people who are not part of your household and you can’t distance, you need to wear a mask — I mean, the message hasn’t changed since the very beginning,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, told POLITICO. “But the receptivity to the messaging, I mean, there’s only so much of that people are going to consume, and it becomes a diminishing return at some point, too.”

There are no new plans or bold initiatives on the horizon, officials in 10 states told POLITICO, even as much of the South remains unvaccinated and vaccination uptake among children nationwide is well below what state and federal officials would like. Instead, state and federal strategies for managing 130,000 new daily Covid cases in the U.S. are largely the same as they were for managing 30,000 new daily cases four months ago.

The fear, expressed in both red and blue states, is that if state officials sound the alarm on this Covid surge too early, the public won’t listen later if hospital capacity becomes strained, or the number of daily deaths starts to rapidly increase. Louisiana, for instance, has the second highest case count in the country per capita but is only seeing a quarter of the new daily hospital admissions it did during the Omicron wave and about 15 percent of the deaths.