Now that infection rates are trending up again from their early-spring low, it’s hard to put them in perspective. Sure, we’ve once again blown past the mark of 60,000 new documented cases a day (and that’s just the ones we know about), but that’s less than 10 percent of what the CDC was recording in mid-January, when the original version of Omicron, now called BA.1, was at the top of its game. Sure, hospitalizations are headed in the wrong direction, but deaths, so far, are still going down. If BA.1’s horrific blitzkrieg was a wave, what do we call this? A wavelet? A swell? A bump, a ripple, a Hobbit-size hillock? Euphemisms for the recent rise—sharp, but not the sharpest—have been trickling in for weeks. But maybe it’s time to just call a surge a surge.

To be fair, terms like surge and wave don’t “really mean anything, scientifically,” says Sam Scarpino, the vice president of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation. Still, two years into the pandemic, many people have gotten an intuitive feel for what those words can imply: a sudden and sustained upwelling in infections that activates our crisis radar. It’s terminology that goes beyond semantics. In detecting and describing surges, we can then react to them—take precautions, enact policy changes, in essence hunker down for a bit until the threat abates. Surges are the upswings we take seriously enough to name, to number, to do something about.

Calling waves and surges was more straightforward in 2020 and most of 2021. Americans’ conceptions of crisis were well-enough aligned to delineate the country’s first five peaks, which all fell within about an order of magnitude of one another—a range small enough to assess on the screen of a smartphone. Back then, logging 50,000 cases a day was bad; 200,000 felt hellish. Now, though, the scale bar is different, and our collective sense for what constitutes a concerning case jump is totally out of whack. “We’ve developed a new normal,” says Maia Majumder, an infectious-disease modeler at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, that casts what we endured in January as “the very worst possible thing.” After BA.1’s squeeze, our COVID barometer is broken: Anything that’s better than this winter just feels straight-up good.