If SARS-CoV-2 is here to stay, then most people will encounter it at some point in their life, as my colleague James Hamblin predicted last February. That can be hard to accept, because many people spent the past year trying very hard to avoid the virus entirely. But “it’s not really the virus on its own that is terrifying,” Jennie Lavine, an infectious-disease researcher at Emory University, told me. “It’s the combination of the virus and a naive immune system. Once you don’t have the latter, the virus doesn’t have to be so scary.”

Think of it this way: SARS-CoV-2, the virus, causes COVID-19, the disease—and it doesn’t have to. Vaccination can disconnect the two. Vaccinated people will eventually inhale the virus but need not become severely ill as a result. Some will have nasty symptoms but recover. Many will be blissfully unaware of their encounters. “There will be a time in the future when life is like it was two years ago: You run up to someone, give them a hug, get an infection, go through half a box of tissues, and move on with your life,” Lavine said. “That’s where we’re headed, but we’re not there yet.”

None of the experts I talked with would predict when we would reach that point, especially because many feel humbled by Delta’s summer rise. Some think it’s plausible that the variant will reach most unvaccinated Americans quickly, making future surges unlikely. “When we come through, I think we’ll be pretty well protected against another wave, but I hesitate to say that, because I was wrong last time,” Rivers said. It’s also possible that there will still be plenty of unvaccinated people for Delta to infect in the fall, and that endemicity only kicks in next year. As my colleague Sarah Zhang wrote, the U.K. will provide clues about what to expect.