The most recent pivots are not likely to spark a wave of behavioral change: Many people already weren’t quarantining after exposures, or routinely being tested by their schools or workplaces, or keeping six feet apart. But shifting guidance could still portend trouble long-term. One of the CDC’s main impetuses for change appears to have been nudging its guidance closer to what the public has felt the status quo should be—a seemingly backward position to adopt. Policies are what normalize behaviors, says Daniel Goldberg, a public-health ethicist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. If that process begins to operate in reverse—“if you always just permit what people are doing to set your policies, guaranteed, you’re going to preserve the status quo.” Now, as recommendations repeatedly describe rather than influence behavior, the country is locked into a “circular feedback loop we can’t seem to get out of,” Ganapathi told me. The policies weaken; people lose interest in following them, spurring officials to slacken even more. That trend in and of itself is perhaps another form of surrender to individualism, in following the choices of single citizens rather than leading the way to a reality that’s better for us all.

No matter how people are acting at this crossroads, this closing won’t work in the way the administration might hope. We can’t, right now, entirely shut the door on the pandemic—certainly not if the overarching goal is to help Americans “move to a point where COVID-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives,” as Massetti noted in a press release. Maybe that would be an option “if we were genuinely at a point in this pandemic where cases didn’t matter,” says Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida. Relaxed guidance would be genuinely less “disruptive” if more people, both in this country and others, were up to date on their vaccines, or if SARS-CoV-2 was far less capable of sparking severe disease and long COVID didn’t exist. (Reed, of the CDC, told me that the agency’s “emphasis on preventing severe disease will also help prevent cases of post-COVID conditions,” adding that “vaccines are an important tool in preventing and treating post-COVID conditions”—even though immunization can’t completely block long COVID and seems to relieve its symptoms in only a subset of people.) Guaranteed paid sick leave, universal health care, and equitable resource allocation would also reduce the toll of loosening the nation’s disaster playbook.