By Caroline Mimbs Nyce The Atlantic

Everyone has COVID. Or at least, that’s how it feels in America right now. The daily-case curve is no longer a curve at all but practically a vertical line, launching like a rocket toward the outermost bounds of every chart. Omicron, the seemingly milder variant driving the surge, is likewise scrambling a lot of our best practices on how to react to such a jump in cases.

What’s clear is that we’re entering a distinct new era of the pandemic. So: If everyone has COVID, what now?

• The appetite for shutdowns just isn’t there. “I wager that, whatever course Omicron—or future strains of the disease—might take, we are about to experience the end of the pandemic as a social phenomenon,” Yascha Mounk argued last month.
• The debate over what precautions to take is only intensifying. “​​One concern I have is that the public will polarize,” Conor Friedersdorf writes in his newsletter, Up for Debate, “and that the ‘return to normality’ faction will be resistant to vaccine boosters.”
• Should you just get Omicron over with? Immunity works in degrees, our staff writer Katherine J. Wu explains, which means a breakthrough case might boost it—but might not make you super-immune.