Now is as good a time as there'll ever be to leave the pandemic bubble

But post-Omicron, many people who are up to date on their vaccinations can enjoy a period—which may be temporary, or may be indefinite—when the coronavirus is what Oster called a “blend into the background” risk, both in terms of your own personal risk and the chance that you’ll spread the virus to others. “If I go to a dinner party,” she said, “I could get in a car accident on the way there or the person can serve some bad shellfish and I can get the norovirus. When does [COVID enter] that space of risks? I think the answer is now.”

Oster also thinks that, assuming cases settle at a lower level and deaths follow, people can stop keeping track of their “risk budgets” like earlier in the pandemic and just do things without agonizing over whether saying yes to one thing necessitates saying no to another. In her view, for people who are boosted and aren’t high-risk, a bigger concern than the health consequences of getting COVID is probably how much a positive test might disrupt your life.