The holidays are coming, and it won’t be like 2020 this time. It’s already obvious in the Halloween decorations, so over-the-top it looks like people are overcompensating for last year’s depressed trick-or-treating.

The pandemic appears to be winding down in the United States in a thousand subtle ways, but without any singular milestone, or a cymbal-crashing announcement of freedom from the virus.

“It doesn’t end. We just stop caring. Or we care a lot less,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said when asked when the pandemic would be over. “I think for most people, it just fades into the background of their lives.”…

“I think it’s becoming slowly part of the furniture,” said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Irvine. He is still wearing masks in grocery stores, but no longer does he always don one of the highly protective N95 masks. “I don’t want to wear scuba gear everywhere I go. This is just part of the human environment now.”