Across the country, almost all government efforts to curtail the coronavirus have evaporated. Mask mandates have been lifted on public transit. Conservative lawmakers have hamstrung what public-health departments can do in emergencies. COVID funding remains stalled in Congress, jeopardizing supplies of tests, treatments, and vaccines. The White House and the CDC have framed COVID as a problem for individuals to act upon—but action is hard when cases and hospitalizations are underestimated, many testing sites have closed, and rose-tinted CDC guidelines downplay the coronavirus’s unchecked spread. Many policy makers have moved on: “We’re heading into the midterms, and I think there’s a real desire to show confidence that they’ve solved this,” Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease specialist and the editor at large for public health at Kaiser Health News, told me.

But COVID is far from solved. The coronavirus is still mutating. Even at one of the lowest death rates of the pandemic, it still claims the lives of hundreds of Americans daily, killing more than twice as many people as die, on average, in car accidents. Its costs are still disproportionately borne by millions of long-haulers; immunocompromised people; workers who still face unsafe working conditions; and Black, Latino, and Indigenous Americans, who are still dying at higher rates than white Americans. When Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an epidemiologist and physician at UC San Francisco, works with low-income, Black, and Latino communities in the Bay Area, their concerns are less about returning to normal and more about “how to keep themselves safe,” she told me. “Take it from a tuberculosis activist that you can lose political will, public attention, and scientific momentum and still have a disease that kills over a million people each year,” Mike Frick of the Treatment Action Group told me. “We’re seeing the TB-ification of COVID start.”

For any disease, there is a moral case against neglecting those who are most vulnerable; for COVID, there’s also still a self-interested case for even the privileged and powerful to resist the pull of neglect. For more than a year, the U.S. has focused on using vaccines and drugs to avert severe disease and death, while deprioritizing other means of preventing infections, such as masks and ventilation. To a degree, this strategy is working: Cases and hospitalizations recently spiked again, while ICU admissions rose gently and deaths have remained stable. And yet, infections still matter, and are affecting all of American society, including the vaxxed-and-done. The coronavirus periodically takes waves of educators and health-care workers out of action; the entire health-care system is now perpetually overburdened and unable to provide its former standard of care. People are still being disabled by long COVID, often without ever landing in the hospital. And uncontrolled infections are a gift to the virus, which keeps birthing new variants that could prolong the current level of crisis or send it spiraling back into a greater level of disruption.