The president sounded exhausted. He knows the American people are too, and on the day of the longest night, the day when the Northern Hemisphere reaches its farthest tilt from the sun, he said as much.

“I want to start by acknowledging how tired, worried, and frustrated I know you are,” Joe Biden said in a White House address Tuesday, when he unveiled new measures to battle the omicron variant of the coronavirus.

Much of the message was familiar.

He said again that if you aren’t vaccinated, get the shot. And he said that if you are already vaccinated, get the booster. “It’s free. It’s convenient. I promise you,” the president went on, “it saves lives. And I honest to God believe it’s your patriotic duty.”

Some of it was new.

He promised that the federal government would surge resources to hospitals, add testing sites around the country, and soon make 500 million at-home rapid tests freely available. “It’s critically important that we know who’s infected,” he said, and “that means we need more testing.”