In places like Florida and Texas, people have been living for months with few if any restrictions. But residents of Covid-cautious cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco said they were now trying to figure out the new rules of the road after two years of anxious vigilance.

Should they let themselves go maskless in public? Would they make others feel uncomfortable at the supermarket or gym? They worried about alienating or infecting vulnerable friends and family. Some parents said they were glad their children could finally attend school without a mask while others worried that children still too young to get vaccinated were now at greater risk of infection.

Several people said they felt whipsawed as Democratic mayors and governors who once championed safety measures as a public good and emblem of civic virtue now seemed ready to turn the page on a pandemic that, while easing, is still killing more than 1,000 people every day across the United States.

“We’ve built up this armor of strategies to reduce transmission, and it’s just hard to take that armor off,” said Marcel Moran, an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, who taught his first unmasked classes this past week after the university dropped its indoor requirement.