“The models in late spring were pretty consistent that we were going to have a ‘normal’ summer,” Samuel Scarpino of the Rockefeller Foundation, who studies infectious-disease dynamics, told me. “It’s the eighth month of 2021, and I can’t believe we’re still having these conversations,” Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me.īut something is different now-the virus. Three months later, cases and hospitalizations are rising, indoor masking is back, and schools and universities are opening uneasily-again.

It stumbled into the normality trap, craving a return to the carefree days of 2019 in May, after the CDC ended indoor masking for vaccinated people, President Joe Biden gave a speech that felt like a declaration of victory. It succumbed to magical thinking by acting as if a variant that had ravaged India would spare a country where half the population still hadn’t been vaccinated. It went all in on one countermeasure-vaccines-and traded it off against masks and other protective measures. America has fallen prey to many of the same self-destructive but alluring instincts that I identified last year. This new surge brings a jarring sense of déjà vu. is once again looping through the pandemic spiral. Now the fourth surge is under way and the U.S. And though experts looked anxiously to the fall, few predicted that the Delta variant would begin its ascent at the start of July. Many Americans began to hope that the country had enough escape velocity to exit its cycle of missteps and sickness. declined and, by summer’s edge, had reached their lowest levels since the pandemic’s start. But after vaccines arrived in midwinter, cases in the U.S.

I n September 2020, just before COVID-19 began its wintry surge through the United States, I wrote that the country was trapped in a pandemic spiral, seemingly destined to repeat the same mistakes.

7 days to die hoe