“I truly, truly think we are in the endgame,” said Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist and professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. “The cases will start plummeting in mid- to late September and by mid-October, we will be in a manageable place, where the virus is a concern for health professionals, but not really for the general public.”

Gandhi bases her optimism on the fact that all previous epidemics of respiratory viruses have ended through the acquisition of immunity, whether by vaccination or natural infection. Although viruses do keep changing, potentially circumventing people’s defenses, “they mutate quickly, at a cost to themselves,” weakening over time. Gandhi said she believes the delta variant that has hit the United States so hard that this summer will mark the peak of this virus’s strength.

But Gandhi warns she has been wrong before: In February 2020, she said the United States would not tolerate a disease that killed 100 Americans a day; people would come together to do whatever it took to stop that. That didn’t happen.