The Latest on Covid-19 Cases, Variants and Mask Mandates: Live Updates

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With new coronavirus cases declining across much of the United States, even as deaths remain high, state leaders from different sides of the partisan divide said Sunday that it was time for Americans to get back to their normal lives, while continuing to prepare for the next inevitable surge.

Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat, signaled a growing acceptance among some political leaders that Covid will not be eliminated.

“We’re not going to manage this to zero,” he said to Chuck Todd on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “We have to learn how to live with this.”

Mr. Murphy appeared alongside Gov. Asa Hutchison of Arkansas, a Republican. The two were in Washington, D.C., for the three-day meeting of the National Governors Association, of which Mr. Hutchinson is chair and Mr. Murphy is vice chair.

According to many health experts, the next phase of the virus in the United States may depend on what new possible variants emerge, vaccination rates and risk tolerance. Herd immunity to Covid, public health specialists say, is unlikely to be achieved.

“We need to move from a pandemic status and mode of operation to a more endemic, where we’re normalizing, taking it very seriously, preparing, but I think we need to move out of the panic mode,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “We need to handle this to make sure we can continue with our normal lives.”

At the same time, he acknowledged that additional new coronavirus variants may be inevitable, and called on the federal government to provide assistance so states can build their testing capacity and increase access to treatments by accelerating production and improving the supply chain.

“That’s where the federal government needs to step up,” he said. “Let’s take advantage of this going down to be prepared for what’s around the corner.”

Another governor, Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, also a Republican, called for what he described as sustainable public health approaches from the state governments and gave voice to the opposition to top-down mandates for or against masking.

“We don’t want to be turning our emergency orders, our mandates, and our regulations off — on and off like a light switch,” he said to Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Guidelines for lifting indoor mask mandates and other public health measures may have to be eased because Omicron is so easily contagious and has become so ubiquitous, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration who serves on the board of directors of Pfizer, said in an interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

Right now, the guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is that mitigation measures can be lifted when community prevalence of the virus is low, which the agency defines as 10 cases per 100,000 people per day, Dr. Gottlieb said.

“In the age of Omicron, with a much more contagious variant, and with the fact that the population has a lot of immunity so we are less susceptible overall, we may need to rethink that,” Dr. Gottlieb said.

“I’m not so sure we’ll get to 10 any time soon,” he said, adding that with a “stealth” variant from the Omicron viral family now appearing, “we may stall out at 20, and that may be when we withdraw a lot of those measures.”