But what the medical community is experiencing is an extreme version of what might be recognizable to many of us: the sense that competing realities are simultaneously asserting themselves. This makes existing right now an exercise in the uncanny. It is easier to agree that things are bad than it is to acknowledge that matters are in some respects improving. That no one is quite sure how or on what scale those are improvements are taking place has generated a moment of unusual ambiguity in which no account of the present quite adds up or makes sense.

This is particularly true of the pandemic: The omicron variant of the coronavirus was characterized by many experts as “mild” compared with delta even as thousands of flights were canceled across the country during the holiday season due because of how wide and how quickly the variant was spreading. These are not contradictory facts, but they feel like they’re in conflict; the optimism of the experts clashes with startling realities on the ground. Rates of death have not kept pace with record-breaking hospitalizations, which is good news, but try to tell that to overwhelmed staff, or to patients stuck with 36-hour wait times in emergency rooms across the country. And while the president’s comments about the unvaccinated being at higher risk are undoubtedly true, it confused people that vaccination and boosting—while still significantly reducing the risk of severe disease and hospitalization—did not prevent infection or transmission as many hoped it would, and as occurred did with previous variants. These apparent contradictions are destabilizing to conventional wisdom (and what little there is of that does not mutate with the same facility as a virus).

And so, conclusions that seemed obviously correct before—in favor of masking, lockdowns, quarantines, school closures, or keeping workers sick with COVID away from workplaces—are being hotly debated now in ways they weren’t then, because we’re in a moment when things are almost incomprehensibly better and worse.