By MARIA CHENG and CARLA K. JOHNSON

AP – Scientists are seeing signals that COVID-19′s alarming omicron wave may have peaked in Britain and is about to do the same in the U.S., at which point cases may start dropping off dramatically.

The reason: The variant has proved so wildly contagious that it may already be running out of people to infect, just a month and a half after it was first detected in South Africa.

“It’s going to come down as fast as it went up,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.

At the same time, experts warn that much is still uncertain about how the next phase of the pandemic might unfold. The plateauing or ebbing in the two countries is not happening everywhere at the same time or at the same pace. And weeks or months of misery still lie ahead for patients and overwhelmed hospitals even if the drop-off comes to pass.

“There are still a lot of people who will get infected as we descend the slope on the backside,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, which predicts that reported cases will peak within the week.

The University of Washington’s own highly influential model projects that the number of daily reported cases in the U.S. will crest at 1.2 million by Jan. 19 and will then fall sharply “simply because everybody who could be infected will be infected,” according to Mokdad.

In fact, he said, by the university’s complex calculations, the true number of new daily infections in the U.S. — an estimate that includes people who were never tested — has already peaked, hitting 6 million on Jan. 6.

In Britain, meanwhile, new COVID-19 cases dropped to about 140,000 a day in the last week, after skyrocketing to more than 200,000 a day earlier this month, according to government data.

Numbers from the U.K.’s National Health Service this week show coronavirus hospital admissions for adults have begun to fall, with infections dropping in all age groups.

Kevin McConway, a retired professor of applied statistics at Britain’s Open University, said that while COVID-19 cases are still rising in places such as southwest England and the West Midlands, the outbreak may have peaked in London.

The figures have raised hopes that the two countries are about to undergo something similar to what happened in South Africa, where in the span of about a month the wave crested at record highs and then fell significantly.

“We are seeing a definite falling-off of cases in the U.K., but I’d like to see them fall much further before we know if what happened in South Africa will happen here,” said Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia.

Dr. David Heymann, who previously led the World Health Organization’s infectious diseases department, said Britain was “the closest to any country of being out of the pandemic,” adding that COVID-19 was inching towards becoming endemic.

Differences between Britain and South Africa, including Britain’s older population and the tendency of its people to spend more time indoors in the winter, could mean a bumpier outbreak for the country and other nations like it.

On the other hand, British authorities’ decision to adopt minimal restrictions against omicron could enable the virus to rip through the population and run its course much faster than it might in Western European countries that have imposed tougher COVID-19 controls, such as France, Spain and Italy.

Shabir Mahdi, dean of health sciences at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand, said European countries that impose lockdowns won’t necessarily come through the omicron wave with fewer infections; the cases may just be spread out over a longer period of time.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization said there have been 7 million new COVID-19 cases across Europe in the past week, calling it a “tidal wave sweeping across the region.” WHO cited modeling from Mokdad’s group that predicts half of Europe’s population will be infected with omicron within about eight weeks.

By that time, however, Hunter and others expect the world to be past the omicron surge.

“There will probably be some ups and downs along the way, but I would hope that by Easter, we will be out of this,” Hunter said.

Still, the sheer numbers of people infected could prove overwhelming to fragile health systems, said Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.

“The next few weeks are going to be brutal because in absolute numbers, there are so many people being infected that it will spill over into ICUs,” Jha said.

Mokdad likewise warned in the U.S.: “It’s going to be a tough two or three weeks. We have to make hard decisions to let certain essential workers continue working, knowing they could be infectious.”

Omicron could one day be seen as a turning point in the pandemic, said Meyers, at the University of Texas. Immunity gained from all the new infections, along with new drugs and continued vaccination, could render the coronavirus something with which we can more easily coexist.

“At the end of this wave, far more people will have been infected by some variant of COVID,” Meyers said. “At some point, we’ll be able to draw a line — and omicron may be that point — where we transition from what is a catastrophic global threat to something that’s a much more manageable disease.”

That’s one plausible future, she said, but there is also the possibility of a new variant — one that is far worse than omicron — arising.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By ALEXANDRA JAFFE, COLLEEN LONG and JEFF AMY

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden will use a speech in Georgia to endorse changing Senate filibuster rules that have stalled voting rights legislation, saying it’s time to choose “democracy over autocracy.” But some civil rights groups won’t be there, in protest of what they say is administration inaction.

Biden on Tuesday will pay tribute to civil rights battles past — visiting Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once held forth from the pulpit, and placing a wreath at the crypt of King and his wife, Coretta Scott King — before turning to today’s challenge.

With Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., setting up Martin Luther King Jr. Day as the deadline to either pass voting legislation or consider revising the rules, Biden is expected to evoke the memories of the U.S. Capitol riot a year ago in more forcefully aligning himself with the effort.

Biden plans to tell his audience, “The next few days, when these bills come to a vote, will mark a turning point in this nation.”

“Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice? I know where I stand. I will not yield. I will not flinch,” he’ll say, according to prepared remarks. “I will defend your right to vote and our democracy against all enemies foreign and domestic. And so the question is where will the institution of United States Senate stand?”

A White House official, previewing the speech on the condition of anonymity, said Biden would voice support for changing the Senate filibuster rules only to ensure the right to vote is defended — a strategy Democrats have been looking to the president to embrace. Filibuster rules require 60 votes to advance most legislation — a threshold Senate Democrats can’t meet on their own with their thin, 50-50 Senate majority. Republicans unanimously oppose the voting rights measures.

Some voting rights advocates planned to boycott the speech. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, known for her untiring voting rights work, also was skipping the event. Aides said Abrams had a conflict but didn’t explain further, though she tweeted support for the president.

“We’re beyond speeches. At this point, what we need, what we are demanding, is federal legislation,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Votes Matter. And it can’t happen soon enough, she said.

So far, Democrats have been unable to agree among themselves over potential changes to the Senate filibuster rules to allow action on voting rights, despite months of private negotiations.

Biden in the past has waded more cautiously into the debate — he is a former longtime senator who largely stands by existing rules but is also under enormous political pressure to engineer a breakthrough.

Voting rights advocates in Georgia and nationwide are increasingly anxious about what may happen in 2022 and beyond, following enactment of Republican-pushed laws that make it harder to vote coming off Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 and his subsequent push to overturn the results, despite no evidence of widespread fraud.

Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who is senior pastor of the church Biden will visit and who made history as the first Black senator elected in Georgia, said ahead of the speech that “anything that can happen that will continue to shine a bright light on the urgency of this issue is important.”

Warnock is among senators set to accompany Biden to Georgia aboard Air Force One. He said he believes Biden understands that “democracy itself is imperiled by this all-out assault that we’ve been witnessing by state legislatures all across the country, and this is a moral moment. Everybody must show up.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki rejected some activists’ complaints that Biden hasn’t been a strong enough advocate.

“I think we would dispute the notion that the president hasn’t been active or vocal. He’s given a range of speeches, he’s advocated for voting rights to pass,” she said. “We understand the frustration by many advocates that this is not passed into law, yet. He would love to have signed this into law himself.”

But laws have already passed in at least 19 states that make it more difficult to vote. Voting rights groups view the changes as a subtler form of the ballot restrictions like literacy tests and poll taxes once used to disenfranchise Black voters, now a key Democratic constituency.

And Republicans who have fallen in line behind Trump’s election misinformation are separately promoting efforts to influence future elections by installing sympathetic leaders in local election posts and backing for elective office some of those who participated in the violent Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol a year ago.

Georgia is at the center of it all, one of the key battleground states in the 2020 elections. After the votes were counted and recounted, Trump told a top state election official he wanted the official to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss. The state’s votes nonetheless went to Biden, and both of its Senate seats went to Democrats as well.

Then last year, the Republican governor signed a sweeping rewrite of election rules that, among other things, gives the State Election Board new powers to intervene in county election offices and to remove and replace local election officials. That has led to concerns that the Republican-controlled state board could exert more influence over the administration of elections, including the certification of county results.

The Georgia voting activists said they worked tirelessly to give Democrats control of the Senate and White House, and it’s time for Washington to step up.

Congressional Democrats, for their part, have written voting legislation that would usher in the biggest overhaul of U.S. elections in a generation by striking down hurdles to voting enacted in the name of election security, reducing the influence of big money in politics and limiting partisan influence over the drawing of congressional districts.

The package would create national election standards that would trump state-level GOP laws. It would also restore the ability of the Justice Department to police election laws in states with a history of discrimination.

But to pass the legislation — which Republicans have outright rejected — the Democrats say they must change the Senate rules that allow a minority of 41 senators to block a bill.

“The fight for the ballot is as old as the Republic,” Schumer wrote to his colleagues. “Over the coming weeks, the Senate will once again consider how to perfect this union and confront the historic challenges facing our democracy.”

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Amy reported from Atlanta. AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

By WILL WEISSERT and HANNAH FINGERHUT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Heading into a critical midterm election year, the top political concerns of Americans are shifting in ways that suggest Democrats face considerable challenges to maintaining their control of Congress.

A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that management of the pandemic, once an issue that strongly favored President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats, is beginning to recede in the minds of Americans. COVID-19 is increasingly overshadowed by concerns about the economy and personal finances — particularly inflation — which are topics that could lift Republicans.

Just 37% of Americans name the virus as one of their top five priorities for the government to work on in 2022, compared with 53% who said it was a leading priority at the same time a year ago. The economy outpaced the pandemic in the open-ended question, with 68% of respondents mentioning it in some way as a top 2022 concern. A similar percentage said the same last year, but mentions of inflation are much higher now: 14% this year, compared with less than 1% last year.

Consumer prices jumped 6.8% for the 12 months ending in November, a nearly four-decade high. Meanwhile, roughly twice as many Americans now mention their household finances, namely, the cost of living, as a governmental priority, 24% vs. 12% last year.

The poll was conducted in early December, when worries about the virus were rising as omicron took hold in the country, but before it sparked record caseloads, overwhelmed testing sites and hospitals and upended holiday travel. Still, in recent follow-up interviews with participants, including self-identified Democrats, many said those developments didn’t shake their views.

“If we say anything along the lines of, ‘Let’s wait until the pandemic dies down,’ well, this son of a gun virus has unlimited ability to mutate,” said Mary Small, a 65-year-old pharmaceutical research contractor in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, who hopes efforts to promote gun safety will take center stage in November’s elections, including her state’s race for an open Senate seat. “We might never be done with this.”

That sentiment reflects the challenge for Democrats at the onset of the election year. The party won the White House and control of Congress in 2020 with pledges to manage the pandemic more competently than the Trump administration. After initially earning high marks — roughly 70% approved of Biden’s handling of the pandemic from late February through mid-July — the virus’ persistence has undermined the new president’s message.

Administration officials acknowledge that the public is growing increasingly weary of COVID-19.

“Pandemic fatigue is real, and all of us feel it at some point,” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said in an interview. “As a doctor, I’ve certainly seen it with my patients over the years. When you get tired and beaten down by a health problem — whether it’s a personal health problem or a broader public health challenge — it can lead to disengagement.”

The White House says COVID-19′s waning as a preeminent concern actually underscores its success rolling out preventative measures, including vaccines. It argues that economic jitters now exacerbated by the pandemic eventually will ease.

Still, with Democrats likely struggling to campaign on the idea that they’ve now defeated the virus, the other issues gaining attention among voters pose more immediate political headaches.

Judy Kunzman doesn’t blame Biden for the ongoing pandemic, calling it “just one of those events that are impossible to predict and almost as impossible to fix.” But she’s worried about continued supply chain disruptions, which affect “a lot of the other issues that we’re having: The rising food prices. The fact that I can’t buy my new car.”

“Everything has chips and the chips aren’t there,” said Kunzman, 75, of Middletown, Pennsylvania, referring to a pandemic-fueled, global shortage of microchips many electronics depend on. She’s waited months for the car she’d like to become available and noted that her sister faced difficulties finding a new cellphone.

“It’s certainly not the victory the Democrats thought it would be,” Adam Brandon, president of the conservative activist group FreedomWorks, said of the government’s virus response. “We’ll have another wave next year, and I just don’t think anyone’s going to care. I think we’re going to get to a point where everyone’s just going to have to learn to live with it. This will die with a whimper as people just lose interest.”

Many respondents in the survey said they’re not suggesting the country ignore the pandemic. But compared with last year, higher percentages of people called out other issues, including immigration among Republicans and gun control among Democrats, as pressing in 2022. Some said they were encouraged by early indications that the latest outbreak, while spreading fast, could have milder effects for many.

“I’m hopeful with omicron,” said Samantha Flowers, a 33-year-old community college teacher in Columbia, Missouri, which has its own open Senate seat on November’s ballot. “Even though more people are getting it, the sickness hasn’t been as harsh for most people. Since we’re all going to end up sick anyway, let it be one that we can recover from better.”

Dorrie Keough from Garrettsville, Ohio, said she’s vaccinated against COVID-19 and gotten a booster shot, but is still staying home as much as possible because of omicron.

“Whoever’s not in power is going to spin it in such a way to make it look worse than it might be,” said Keough, 68, whose state also has an open Senate seat this year. “As much reading as I do — and as much investigating that I do — it’s real hard for me to parse out what is actually happening versus what people are saying is happening.”

Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said the key to Democrats’ 2022 success is easing COVID-19 fears — but also delivering tangible policy results. That includes passing Biden’s “Build Back Better,” the massive social spending bill that remains stalled in the Senate.

“I don’t think we’re going to win an election for lack of anxiety,” Green said, “if we’ve achieved nothing else.”

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Associated Press writer Zeke Miller contributed to this report.

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,089 adults was conducted Dec. 2-7 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.