Have we already ruined our next COVID summer?

I asked Deshira Wallace, a public-health researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, what would make this summer less than rosy—or possibly, close to cataclysmic. “Continuing as is right now,” she told me. The pandemic is indeed still going, and the U.S. is at a point where excessive mingling could prolong the crisis. Tracking rises in cases, and responding to them early, is crucial for keeping a soft upslope from erupting into a full-on surge. And yet, across the nation, “we’ve been seeing every single form of protection revoked,” Wallace said. Indoor mask mandates have disappeared. Case-tracking surveillance systems have pulled back or gone dark. Community test and vaccination sites have vanished. Even data out of hospitals have begun to falter and fizz. Federal funds to combat the pandemic have dried up too, imperiling stocks of treatments and care for the uninsured, as the nation’s leaders continue to play chicken with what it means for coronavirus cases to stay “low.” And though many of the tools necessary to squelch SARS-CoV-2 exist, their distribution is still not being prioritized to the vulnerable populations who most need them. Spread is now definitively increasing, yet going unmeasured and unchecked.

Americans would have less to worry about if they reversed some of these behavioral trends, Wallace told me. But she’s not counting on it. Which puts the onus on immunity, or sheer luck on the variant side, to countervail, which are gambles as well. Say no new variant appears, but immunity inevitably erodes, and no one masks—what then? Behavior is the variable we hold most sway over, but America’s grip has loosened. Last year, around this time, “there were more protections in place,” Wallace said. “Now it just feels like we’re in chaos.”