Which leaves us with coordinated behavioral change—a strategy that exactly no one feels optimistic about. Precautionary policies are gone; several governments are focused on counting hospitalizations and deaths, allowing infections to skyrocket as long as the health-care system stays intact. “Everyone just wants some sense of normalcy,” UW’s Roychoudhury said. Even many people who consider themselves quite COVID-conscious have picked up old social habits again. “The floodgates just opened this year,” Martinez said. He, too, has eased up a bit in recent months, wearing a mask less often at small gatherings with friends, and more often bowing to peer pressure to take the face covering off. Ajay Sethi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, still works at home, and avoids eating with strangers indoors. He masks in crowded places, but at home, as contractors remodel his bathrooms, he has decided not to—a pivot from last year. His chances of suffering from the virus haven’t changed much; what has is “probably more my own fatigue,” he told me, “and my willingness to accept more risk than before.”

The global situation has, to be fair, immensely improved. Vaccines and treatments have slashed the proportion of people who are ending up seriously sick and dead, even when case rates climb. And the virus’s pummel should continue to soften, Hill told me, as global immunity grows. Chu, of the University of Washington, is also optimistic that SARS-CoV-2 will eventually, like flu and other coronaviruses, adhere to some seasonality, becoming a threat that can be managed with an annually updated shot.

But the degree to which the COVID situation improves, and when those ease-ups might unfold, are not guaranteed—and the current burden of infection remains unsustainably heavy. Long COVID still looms; “mild” sicknesses can still leave people bedridden for days, and take them away from school, family, and work. And with reinfections now occurring more frequently, individuals are each “more often rolling the die” that could make them chronically or seriously ill, Hodcroft, of the University of Bern, told me. In the Northern Hemisphere, that’s all happening against the backdrop of summer. The winter ahead will likely be even worse.