KAROL MARKOWICZ: Florida’s Plague Is the Media’s Cold.

Now it can be said: Covid-19 isn’t going away. CNN’s Brian Stelter lectured his audience Sunday on “what living with Covid really means.” He cited “a highly transmissible variant” that has caused “many, many, many cases . . . here in New York City,” and said: “It seems that in some media circles this was the week that getting Covid became an inevitability.”

All the right people are coming down with what BuzzFeed’s Julia Reinstein dubbed the “media variant.” Suddenly getting Covid is cool. “You have about 12 hours left to get covid if you want to stay on trend,” tweeted Business Insider’s Jake Swearingen. “I don’t think this means shutting back down,” tweeted podcaster Lydia Polgreen. “I think it has to mean accepting that getting COVID is just a thing that’s going to happen to all of us, so behave accordingly (and get vaccinated).” Even President Biden is easing off, with his speech Tuesday stressing the importance of keeping schools and businesses open.

But when the virus was surging in the South this summer, media figures took a different tone. Covid could be stopped, they insisted, if only those rubes would behave correctly. Florida was a particular target because its governor had ended lockdowns and mandates early and was pushing for schools to stop requiring masks. A typical piece, by CNN’s Chris Cillizza, was titled “ Ron DeSantis ’ priorities on Covid-19 are all screwed up.” A chastened Mr. Cillizza tweeted last Friday that he had learned the vaccine “can never do what I had hoped: Ensure no one I loved will become infected,” and that “I realize I am way behind lots of other people in doing that.”

That’s for sure. A lot of the information that media types finally seem ready to accept has been available for some time. The World Health Organization said in September that the virus will continue to mutate like the flu. “People have said we’re going to eliminate or eradicate the virus,” said Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s emergencies program. “No we’re not—very, very unlikely.”

The reason it took so long for this reality to penetrate the media bubble is political. Journalists believed red states would get sick while blue ones would be spared. Some still do: A Dec. 17 Washington Post piece by columnist Paul Waldman was headlined “The red covid wave is here.”

Earlier: The Corporate Media Freakout Over The Omicron Variant Isn’t Normal, It’s Psychotic.