Even if COVID can’t be avoided forever, there are good reasons to try to avoid getting or passing it on over the next several weeks. Better treatments for Omicron are on the horizon, Syra Madad, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard, told me. Pfizer’s very effective pill has just been authorized by the FDA, but supplies are short. Only one monoclonal antibody, sotrovimab, currently works against Omicron, and supplies are also short. “It’s a terrible time to unfortunately be hospitalized and not have these types of therapies available,” Madad said. In a few months, the outlook will get better for individual people at serious risk from COVID.

For society at large, too, a huge number of cases right now is a risk to our hospitals and our essential services. Consider everything that someone who is vulnerable to COVID needs, Leininger said. “We need water in her faucet, and we need food in her fridge. And we need the visiting nurse to be able to fly in because our hospitals are under siege,” she told me. That means water plants and grocery stores and airlines need employees to stay healthy and continue working.

This is where things get messier. Our Omicron strategy is also constrained, at this point, by the willingness of a wearier public. With so much virus out there, we are once again needing to flatten the curve. But back in March 2020, we understood social distancing to “flatten the curve” as a temporary measure to get us through the next weeks or months. “Well, now it’s been two years. Do we have to do this for five years? It’s just not sustainable,” says Julie Downs, who studies risk perception at Carnegie Mellon University. If the most drastic COVID restrictions—stay-at-home orders and preemptive closures—are off the table, then we cannot avoid a staggering number of Omicron cases.