Lockdowns:

• Comprehensive tallies of U.S. state responses show that formal statewide stay‑at‑home orders were a 2020 phenomenon, with end dates in spring 2020; the tables list no new statewide stay‑at‑home orders being imposed after those were lifted, and there is no entry indicating new stay‑at‑home mandates during the late‑2021/early‑2022 Omicron wave. This includes large states such as California, whose mandatory statewide stay‑at‑home order ended January 25, 2021 and was replaced by a reopening framework rather than reimposed later. 【2search12】2search13】2search14】
• Analyses of the Omicron wave note that, despite very rapid and widespread transmission from December 2021 through February 2022, the U.S. did not pursue a stringent zero‑COVID strategy based on broad lockdowns, instead relying on tools like vaccination, masking, and testing. 【1search2】
• Federally, President Biden said as Omicron emerged that he did not anticipate reinstating U.S. “shutdowns or lockdowns,” framing Omicron as a “cause for concern, not a cause for panic,” and emphasizing vaccines, boosters, and masks instead. White House statements around this time likewise stressed that with available tools, there was “no need for lockdowns.” 【4search1】4search3】2search0】
• At the state level, governors in both Democratic and Republican states publicly rejected new lockdowns during the Omicron surge; for example, Maryland’s governor anticipated a severe hospitalization surge but explicitly said he was not considering a lockdown and criticized large‑scale school shutdowns. 【4search2】

Taken together, available evidence indicates that after Omicron’s emergence in late 2021, U.S. states did not return to broad, state‑level stay‑at‑home orders analogous to March–April 2020.

Schools:

• Policy summaries and state chronologies for the Omicron period describe targeted, short‑term shifts to remote learning driven by local staffing and case spikes, rather than new blanket state orders closing all K–12 schools. For instance, Pennsylvania’s record notes that in January 2022 “many schools temporarily switched to virtual learning” due to Omicron‑driven cases among students and staff, but this is described as the result of local decisions, not a renewed statewide closure mandate. 【4search12】
• City‑level accounts show similar patterns: Philadelphia’s district temporarily moved 81 schools online for staffing reasons in early January 2022, while maintaining in‑person instruction elsewhere in the district, again without a state‑ordered, system‑wide shutdown. 【5search17】
• Major states’ Omicron‑era guidance (e.g., Illinois) focused on updating mitigation protocols specifically to maintain in‑person learning rather than to close schools; guidance from state education and health agencies in January 2022 framed testing, isolation rules, and masking as tools to keep classrooms open. 【5search1】
• New York City’s January 2022 response similarly expanded school testing and changed quarantine rules so that exposed classmates could remain in school with negative tests, explicitly avoiding a shift back to full remote learning. 【5search16】

There were localized and sometimes large district‑level closures (Chicago, parts of Philadelphia, various districts in multiple states), but they were temporary, fragmented, and not imposed as broad state‑level shutdowns of K–12 systems. At the same time, federal and state rhetoric consistently emphasized keeping schools open with mitigation rather than returning to 2020‑style closures.

Assessment relative to the normalized prediction:

• The user’s normalized version interprets Sacks as predicting that, after Omicron emerged in late 2021, the U.S. would not see a return to broad statewide stay‑at‑home lockdowns or widespread, state‑mandated K–12 school closures, even if Omicron spread widely.
• The historical record through late 2025 supports that characterization: Omicron produced a very large wave, but it did not trigger new statewide stay‑at‑home orders, nor did states generally re‑close their entire K–12 systems by mandate; instead, there were local, temporary, and often district‑specific shifts to remote learning.

Under that normalized, aggregate reading, Sacks’s prediction about U.S. policy response to Omicron is right. A literal reading (“no school closures anywhere”) would be false, but given the clarified scope—broad, state‑level lockdowns and closures—the prediction matches what actually happened.