In early January the state of Massachusetts added a new set of figures to its Covid-19 dashboard. Two years into the pandemic, it began to draw a distinction between people who were hospitalized because of the virus and people who were there for other reasons but also happened to be infected.
Nothing changed inside the hospitals’ walls—a Covid-positive patient there because of a car crash still had to be isolated. But the effect on the state’s numbers was dramatic. It cut them in half.
While cases have plunged and the death tally is slowing, the U.S. will in the next few weeks pass 1 million Covid fatalities, and more than half the country has been infected. There will almost certainly be more waves of illness, either from new variants or as a seasonal event. When those waves come, they will hopefully be less deadly, thanks to a wall of immunity from vaccinations and prior infections. And because of that, political leaders, health experts, and regular people across the country are adopting new attitudes toward risk and what costs they’re willing to pay to stop transmission.
