What must be acknowledged now, a year and a half into the pandemic, is that COVID-19 is not the only risk that people need to balance. Forgoing regular socializing, routine medical checkups, and in-person schooling might be worthwhile in the short term, but abstaining from all of those things in perpetuity comes with its own dangers. “What we’ve given up is not nothing,” Kirk Sell told me. “Something that has been lost in the past year and a half are the trade-offs, and the introduction of readily available and highly effective vaccines and some people’s refusal to get them just makes all of this internal math so much trickier.” As someone who studies risk communication, she said, she hates the phrase an abundance of caution. If you find yourself determining that things you want to do are pretty low risk and still shy away from them, you’re likely cutting yourself off from opportunities that may provide significant health benefits: getting out to exercise, resuming regular social relationships with vaccinated friends and family.

Kirk Sell uses her own decision calculus as an example of what those kinds of evaluations might look like: She thinks it’s very important for her kids to have school in person, even though they are too young to be vaccinated, but she is also actively lobbying the school to implement ways to make that safer, such as enhanced ventilation and filtration. For parents whose kids did relatively well in Zoom school or whose community is in the middle of a serious outbreak, she says, the best conclusion might be a different one, and it might change for any parent as the school year progresses and local case rates go up and down.