“I think we do need off-ramps, yes,” Brown University economist Emily Oster, who has written extensively about the pandemic, told Yahoo News. But, she added, “I am not sure what they should be. Vaccination rates? Case rates? Hospitalization rates?”

On the national level, at least, no one appears eager to answer the questions Oster and others are starting to ask with increasing urgency, now that it looks like masks will stay on, in many school districts, into 2022…

A spokesperson for the CDC told Yahoo News that the agency has no plans to update current federal guidance, which “recommends universal indoor masking” for students, teachers and staff regardless of vaccination status. Likewise, in California — where some districts go so far as to require masks outdoors, even though the virus rarely spreads in the open air — state officials answered the San Francisco Chronicle’s recent questions about off-ramps by referring to an Oct. 20 statement affirming that the current rules will stay in effect for now.

“It’s certainly a possibility that we could update our recommendation,” the CDC spokesperson told Yahoo News. “I don’t think we’re going to do it in the next month or so.”