The next six months of this pandemic may look dispiriting. But that doesn’t mean we’re doomed.

“Hot vax summer” never quite materialized. For parents, like me, and other caregivers with vulnerable family members, it wasn’t clear what exactly we could do safely. Now, as Covid-19 cases in the United States spike and we learn that vaccinated people may transmit the delta variant to others, we are all donning masks again and gritting our teeth in preparation for more restrictions. And we’re wondering: Will it always be like this?

The science is pretty clear: SARS-CoV-2 is here to stay. It will become endemic, which means the virus will continue circulating through humans and animals in the next few years. Elimination, where the virus is almost entirely quashed, is possible, but complete eradication would take a lot of work. In fact, the world has eradicated only one infectious disease among humans: smallpox. That took about 200 years of inoculation campaigns. We now know a lot more about conducting widespread vaccination campaigns quickly, but it takes the kind of coordination and national action that few countries have seen yet. Read more at The New Republic.