...life has in many ways returned to something like the Before Times. Restaurants are packed, and cultural performances sold out. Children are sitting in schools, and workers are trickling back into offices. Masks are no longer required in public, even in New York City’s subways.
The summer travel season was a blockbuster. Even cruise ships — derided as floating Petri dishes early in the pandemic — were filling up with eager passengers.
Most Americans want to get back to normalcy and are unwilling to let Covid rule their lives any longer, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House Covid response coordinator, said in an interview. “Those two sets of goals are achievable,” Dr. Jha said, so long as Americans keep getting vaccinated, test when necessary and wear masks in crowded public settings.
In March 2020, New York City’s hospitals filled up with patients desperately ill with Covid-19. In many cases, when their fluid-filled lungs could no longer give them oxygen, doctors sedated them and put them on ventilators.
The patients who recovered were taken off the machines and anesthesia. Within a day or so, their doctors expected them to wake up.
For more than two years, shuttered schools and offices, social distancing and masks granted Americans a reprieve from flu and most other respiratory infections. This winter is likely to be different.
With few to no restrictions in place and travel and socializing back in full swing, an expected winter rise in Covid cases appears poised to collide with a resurgent influenza season, causing a “twindemic” — or even a “tripledemic,” with a third pathogen, respiratory syncytial virus, or R.S.V., in the mix.
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