It’s not light yet, but it’s gettin’ there

There are numerous reasons to think that the U.S. really has turned the corner on the pandemic:

In the United States, there is now an excellent chance that the retreat is permanent. Victory over Covid has not yet arrived, but it is growing close. After almost a year and a half of sickness, death, grieving and isolation, the progress is cause for genuine joy.

More than 60 percent of American adults have received at least one vaccine shot, and the share is growing by about two percentage points per week. Among unvaccinated people, a substantial number have already had Covid and therefore have some natural immunity. “The virus is running out of places to be communicable,” Andy Slavitt, one of President Biden’s top Covid advisers, told me.

The share of Covid tests coming back positive has fallen below 3 percent for the first time since widespread testing began, and the number of hospitalized patients has fallen to the lowest point in 11 months, Dr. Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Translational Institute noted. For the first time since March 5 of last year, San Francisco General Hospital yesterday had no Covid patients — “a truly momentous day,” Dr. Vivek Jain said.

There are still important caveats. Covid remains especially dangerous in communities with low vaccination rates, as Slavitt noted, including much of the Southeast; these communities may suffer through future outbreaks. And about 600 Americans continue to die from the disease every day.

But the sharp decline in cases over the past month virtually guarantees that deaths will fall over the next month. The pandemic appears to be in an exponential-decay phase, as this helpful Times essay by Zoë McLaren explains. “Every case of Covid-19 that is prevented cuts off transmission chains, which prevents many more cases down the line,” she writes.

It’s also worth noting that once we’re about a month out from vaccines essentially being universally available on demand, because the vaccines are so effective at preventing serious illness we’re also at the point where people who refuse to be vaccinated are doing much more harm to themselves than others, which hasn’t been true of irresponsible behavior for most of the pandemic. That’s not no harm — some people are immunocompromised — and getting as many people to take the vaccine as possible remains an urgent priority. But people who are fully vaccinated can pretty much return to their baseline behaviors pending availability with little risk, and that’s a big deal.