Last year, once the country had settled into pandemic thinking for the long haul and starting imagining or even counting on the arrival of vaccines, it became fashionable to talk about the future of the world, post-pandemic, and even to rhapsodize about the possibility of a Roaring ’20s to come, along the lines of the one from the last century that followed the 1918 pandemic. But as the Delta wave receded and vaccinations ticked upward — 85 percent of American seniors are “fully vaccinated,” to use a term we should probably now discard in the age of boosters, and 98 percent have received at least one shot — it almost seemed harder to really see that post-pandemic future clearly. As much of the country has half-tried to move past the pandemic this fall, more than a thousand are still dying each day. In places without a real Delta surge, like New York City, there was nevertheless a rising tide of anxiety, a return to mask wearing and a simmering rage at the remaining unvaccinated. We weren’t really capable of beginning to move on, of starting to see COVID-19 as just another disease, but we also weren’t not moving on, either.

But the arrival of childhood vaccines and really effective post-infection treatment could change all that, clearing quite a bit of that fog, and pointing the way to a fairly intuitive path to at least a “next chapter” for the pandemic, as Topol put it on Twitter. We still need to decide to move on, more or less, because national risk of severe disease hasn’t been brought to zero. But on top of the vaccine effect itself, the new therapies do promise a quite dramatic reduction of that risk, bringing the vulnerability of almost everyone to COVID into the range of far more familiar, quotidian diseases.

Another long-neglected tool could help further: focusing very vigorously, from here, on the vulnerability of the old; indeed, treating COVID-19 as the disease of the very old it has always been (which we’ve refused to acknowledge through most of the pandemic in the interest of universalizing risk and preventing spread at all costs).