4. Wearing an accessory on my head doesn’t feel like a huge cost to me.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t enjoy wearing a mask, and all else equal, I’d still prefer to keep it off. But for me, it’s not a big sacrifice to make for a bit more security: I’ll mainly be using one indoors when I’m around strangers, a situation in which the risk of spread is high. And I’ll keep checking pandemic conditions like I would a weather forecast—hospitalizations, variants, immunization rates, and the behaviors of people around me—and adjust as needed. The idea is that this state of affairs will be short-lived, until vaccinations climb and the virus retreats again.

I live in New England, where things are relatively calm. I could probably get away with resuming normal life, whatever that is. But the status quo feels tenuous. It will take work to maintain. As Delta dominates the nation and case rates rise, we may already be losing our grip. Kuppalli said that although she’s concerned about our current menagerie of variants, she’s also trying to ensure that more problematic versions of the virus don’t have the opportunity to arise. The stakes in her community are particularly high: In South Carolina, where vaccination rates are relatively low, “it’s a free-for-all,” she said. “When I walk into a supermarket, I’m the only one in a mask. People look at you like you’re crazy.”

Vaccines have sometimes been billed as an option to supplant the nuisance of masks. But making that trade-off at an individual level feels overly simplistic in a population where so many people are neither immune nor covered up.