I asked the CDC for its take on what’s up ahead. “We’re in a stronger place today as a nation with more tools to protect ourselves and our communities from COVID-19,” Jasmine Reed, an agency spokesperson, wrote in an email. “CDC’s COVID Community Levels and the corresponding prevention measures allow us to adapt and respond to new variants or a surge in cases.” Somehow that seems tough to square with the dwindling of funds to support further vaccinations, testing, and treatment—especially for the communities that most need to access them. The CDC’s new guidance is contingent on a capacity to react, and the assumption that supplies are free-flowing. They are not; they never have been; they will not be, unless more money comes through. Which means that we’re slated to start this next surge not just with porous shields but without the ability to patch the gaps. At the press briefing, White House officials underlined Congress’s failure to refresh pandemic funds, outlining again the consequences of the shortages that will result.

Without resources to respond quickly to a more dangerous level of disease, our tolerance for infections should be quite low. “To prevent unequal outcomes, you have to prevent people from getting infected in the first place,” says Lakshmi Ganapathi, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital, who has two unvaccinated sons under the age of 5. One option would simply be to return to masking and other measures much earlier; Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, recently proposed a trigger of 50 cases per 100,000 people per week as a way to keep the risk of infection for immunocompromised people lower than 1 percent. (And that’s only if we assume effective monoclonal-antibody treatments are readily available, which they are not.) Most counties in the U.S., for the moment, remain below that benchmark. Salomon and others also propose the idea of more closely tracking how steeply cases are rising over the course of several days—a potentially good way to confirm that transmission is truly starting to deviate from the norm.

But even our metrics are, at this point, kind of on the fritz. So much testing is now done at home that official case numbers are becoming “nearly impossible to interpret,” Scarpino told me.