By CAR­LA K. JOHN­SON | AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS

(AP) — The U.S. is get­ting a first glimpse of what it’s like to ex­pe­ri­ence COVID-19 out­breaks dur­ing this new phase of liv­ing with the virus, and the ros­ter of the new­ly in­fect­ed is stud­ded with stars.

Cab­i­net mem­bers, House Speak­er Nan­cy Pelosi, Broad­way ac­tors and the gov­er­nors of New Jer­sey and Con­necti­cut have all test­ed pos­i­tive. Out­breaks at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty and Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty are bring­ing back mask re­quire­ments to those cam­pus­es as of­fi­cials seek out quar­an­tine space.

The out­breaks in the North­east may — or may not — sig­nal what’s to come, ex­perts say. Case counts are no longer re­li­able be­cause of­fi­cial test­ing and re­port­ing has been scaled back and more Amer­i­cans are test­ing at home.

Across the na­tion, mask-wear­ing is at its low­est lev­el since April 2020, said Ali Mok­dad, a pro­fes­sor of health met­rics sci­ences at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton in Seat­tle. For every 100 in­fec­tions, on­ly sev­en are record­ed in of­fi­cial tal­lies, ac­cord­ing to his mod­el­ing group’s lat­est es­ti­mate.

Mok­dad ex­pects the high lev­el of U.S. im­mu­ni­ty built up from pre­vi­ous in­fec­tions and vac­ci­na­tions will pro­tect the na­tion from a large surge.

“We’re go­ing to have some in­fec­tions here and there, but it’s not go­ing to shut down the coun­try,” Mok­dad said. “Life has to go on. We have to be vac­ci­nat­ed and boost­ed. We need to pro­tect the vul­ner­a­ble, but we have to get used to it.”

Large in­door gath­er­ings with masks op­tion­al have led to in­fec­tions, with a high-pro­file par­ty in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., now seen as a pos­si­ble su­per-spread­er event. Oth­er in­fec­tion clus­ters out­side of groups that are reg­u­lar­ly test­ed might go un­de­tect­ed, said Josh Michaud, as­so­ciate di­rec­tor of glob­al health pol­i­cy with the Kaiser Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion in Wash­ing­ton.

“It’s hard­er now than it was be­fore to know what’s hap­pen­ing. The fu­ture is a lit­tle fuzzi­er be­cause we don’t have as much in­for­ma­tion at our fin­ger­tips,” Michaud said. “If you’re not an ac­tor in a Broad­way play or a politi­cian you might fall through the test­ing cracks.”

The pub­lic health re­sponse will vary from com­mu­ni­ty to com­mu­ni­ty based on what’s hap­pen­ing lo­cal­ly, Michaud said.

“We’re fight­ing small­er fires in­stead of a rag­ing blaze across the coun­try and those small­er fires can be dis­rup­tive,” Michaud said. “It leaves every­one to choose their own ad­ven­ture when it comes to pan­dem­ic re­sponse and in­di­vid­ual be­hav­iors.”

In Wash­ing­ton D.C., the out­break has been par­tic­u­lar­ly high pro­file — strik­ing mul­ti­ple Cab­i­net sec­re­taries and Con­gress mem­bers along with May­or Muriel Bows­er and the pres­i­dent of George­town Uni­ver­si­ty.

At least a dozen of those in­fec­tions can be traced to the Grid­iron Club din­ner, an an­nu­al fix­ture of the D.C. so­cial cal­en­dar that took place Sat­ur­day for the first time in three years. The din­ner is an ex­am­ple of a re­turn to near-to­tal nor­mal­i­ty that’s tak­ing place around the coun­try, lead­ing to a spike in pos­i­tive tests, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly a cor­re­spond­ing spike in se­ri­ous ill­ness­es or hos­pi­tal­iza­tions.

Wash­ing­ton, D.C., like much of the rest of the coun­try, has great­ly re­laxed its COVID stance in re­cent weeks. Bows­er has al­lowed vac­ci­na­tion and in­door mask­ing man­dates to ex­pire, and the city health de­part­ment stopped re­port­ing dai­ly virus num­bers in ear­ly March. At­ten­dees at the Grid­iron Club din­ner, which Bows­er did not at­tend, had to pro­vide proof of vac­ci­na­tion, but oth­er­wise no mask­ing or so­cial dis­tanc­ing pro­to­cols were ob­served.

And oth­er sta­ples of the D.C. so­cial cal­en­dar are al­so back to nor­mal. The city’s an­nu­al Cher­ry Blos­som Fes­ti­val has been go­ing for weeks — with dozens of as­so­ci­at­ed events, in­clud­ing a pa­rade sched­uled for Sat­ur­day.

Amid that gen­er­al re­turn to pre-pan­dem­ic be­hav­iour, there are a few cau­tion­ary steps back­ward. George­town Uni­ver­si­ty an­nounced it would rein­tro­duce its in­door mask man­date amid ris­ing in­fec­tion num­bers that in­clude uni­ver­si­ty Pres­i­dent John De­Gioia

George­town’s Chief Pub­lic Health Of­fi­cer Ran­it Mishori, in an­nounc­ing the new re­stric­tions, de­scribed the in­fec­tion spike as “sig­nif­i­cant” — par­tic­u­lar­ly among un­der­grad­u­ates. “Thank­ful­ly, with the vast ma­jor­i­ty of our com­mu­ni­ty up to date on vac­ci­na­tion, we are not see­ing cas­es in­volv­ing se­vere ill­ness,” Mishori wrote.

D.C. health chief Dr. LaQuan­dra Nes­bitt, in com­ments to re­porters this week, has point­ed to the on­go­ing low lev­el of hos­pi­tal­iza­tions as proof that the vac­ci­na­tions have suc­cess­ful­ly lim­it­ed the sever­i­ty of the ill­ness.

Virus met­rics in Wash­ing­ton have crept up in the past month ac­cord­ing to the city health de­part­ment. The week­ly case rate per 100,000 res­i­dents climbed from 51 at the be­gin­ning of March to 110 at the end of March. But that’s still far be­low the week­ly case rate of 865 per 100,000 res­i­dents re­port­ed in the sec­ond week of Jan­u­ary dur­ing the omi­cron vari­ant surge.

Nes­bitt said there were no im­me­di­ate plans to re­in­sti­tute any of the lapsed virus pro­to­cols, but that al­ways re­mained an op­tion in the fu­ture.

“We need to re­mem­ber that liv­ing with the virus does not mean for­get­ting about the virus. It’s still out there, it’s still caus­ing peo­ple to get sick and some peo­ple to die,” Michaud said. “If we’re not pre­pared, we could be in a bad sit­u­a­tion quick­ly again.”

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AP writer Ashraf Khalil in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., con­tributed.