Coronavirus cases are, once again, dropping in the United States. But the virus isn’t done with us yet.The Coronavirus Outbreak

(Santiago Mejia / The San Francisco Chronicle / Getty)

Imagine it: The sun is warm, the flowers are in bloom, and no one is talking about the coronavirus. After a bitter January, the country’s Omicron surge is receding, and—although COVID case rates are still much higher than they were last winter—it feels as if a pandemic lull is just around the corner.

Unfortunately, we’ve learned enough to know that we’re stuck with this virus for a while longer, and that it could catch us off guard at any moment.

• The virus is bound to surprise us again. Its “evolutionary leaps look like nothing else we’ve seen before,” Sarah Zhang writes. She offers three possible explanations for why SARS-CoV-2 behaves so differently from other viruses.
• Endemicity is meaningless. “What lies ahead is, still, a big uncertain mess, which the word endemic does far more to obscure than to clarify,” Katherine J. Wu and Jacob Stern argue.
• The hospital crisis isn’t going away. Ed Yong reports on the situation at one Chicago hospital, reminding us that “the staffing shortages that long preceded Omicron’s arrival will remain.”
• We still need to vaccinate millions of the youngest Americans. “The most optimistic timeline for the arrival of an under-5 vaccine has suddenly shrunk to just a few more weeks,” Katie writes, responding to yesterday’s surprising news that Pfizer is requesting emergency use authorization from the FDA for its shots for infants and toddlers.