Suddenly this exceedingly transmissible variant (in combination with its forebear Delta) has arrived at our door with a pistol in its hand to inform us that the jig is finally up. And right now, the only reasonable response seems to be a sheepish, “What took you so long?”

There’s suddenly a strange inevitability to the whole thing. But almost two years after the pandemic began sweeping through America, we live in a vaccine and booster-saturated world. So now, that inevitability is mingling with an aw-shucks fatalism — or maybe it’s just realism. If you’ve been a quarantining, mask-wearing, vaccine-and-booster-getting member of society and have avoided COVID, you’ve really done about the best that can be expected of you throughout these long 19 months. Thanks to your sense of civic responsibility and a hefty dose of socioeconomic luck, you’ve outwitted a highly contagious virus only to be confronted with a far more contagious version of it — even more so than Delta, which was already causing its share of breakthrough cases. You may not evade the coronavirus altogether — a possibility that seemed to exist a few weeks ago, even if it was perhaps always unrealistic — but you’ve likely done enough that its effect on you will be attenuated. Beyond going back to the kind of extreme measures that most people reasonably gave up post-vaccine, there’s not much more you can do from a personal-risk standpoint. Personally speaking, there’s something weirdly liberating about that.