Should your vaccinated grandmother’s death from COVID-19 be considered an acceptable loss? Should seasonal spikes in casualties among the unvaccinated elicit more than a shrug? Should life go on without disruption if a new coronavirus variant starts killing as many youngsters as childhood cancers?

You won’t see politicians calling press conferences to acknowledge that some deaths are inevitable and some lives aren’t worth what it would cost to save them.

But acceptable numbers of deaths are the common currency of public health professionals. And they are a central factor in every debate over when — and after what expenditure of money and effort — the time has come to move on.

Declaring an end to the pandemic is about deciding how much illness, death and disruption is “accepted and acceptable as a part of normal life,” said Erica Charters, a historian with Oxford University’s “How Epidemics End” project.