Abundant at-home rapid tests could have helped with the testing crisis, at least for people trying to determine whether the cold they have is COVID and they should stay home from a family gathering. But getting a rapid test is now nearly impossible in many areas. This is because the U.S. government has never taken testing seriously enough to produce and distribute sufficient tests to handle the pandemic waves that keep coming. Moreover, the Biden administration’s promised 500 million at-home tests won’t arrive in time for the holidays, and the intended volume is far too low to address the country’s testing demand.

The result of these cascading testing and data problems is that just as Omicron transmission really takes off in the United States, the large-scale movement of the pandemic is becoming impossible to discern, while at the scale of the individual, millions of people will be unable to know whether they have COVID. Case numbers will be artificially reduced, along with testing counts. And, at the same time, many people will be unable to get the rapid tests required to tell whether they’re likely to be infectious. Just about the only numbers that might be reliable throughout the holiday disruptions and testing collapse are those in the hospital-utilization data set from the Department of Health and Human Services, which powers visual tools such as The New York Times’ extensive county-level hospitalization maps and trend charts. Of course, hospitalization numbers tend to trail case numbers because people take time to become seriously ill. Far from being an early-warning system, rising hospitalization numbers are a record of things—lives, outbreaks, and attempts at public-health interventions—that have already gone badly wrong.