From the start of the pandemic, we’ve known several things about this coronavirus that make it particularly dangerous. One is its high level of infectiousness, which allows it to quickly overwhelm health care infrastructure. Another is its ability to constantly evolve and change, rapidly upending what we thought we knew. And the other is the vastness of what we don’t know about it, such as the exact nature of the mysterious long-term symptoms it leaves some sufferers with.

So it is only three months after the CDC told people they could unmask again to a hail of criticism from public health experts, and a little over a month since President Joe Biden all but “declared independence” from the pandemic, that the United States seems to be backsliding to the bad old days of 2020’s impossibly dark winter. Cases and hospitalizations are at their highest since February, hospitals are once again being overwhelmed with COVID patients, and an ever growing number of children are ending up in intensive care. According to one model, Americans can expect anywhere between eight hundred fifty and four thousand deaths per day by October this year.

The way out of this is well-established, as modeled by countries like Vietnam, Iceland, New Zealand, and Taiwan: a strict, short-term stay-at-home order, in which both businesses and workers are fully underwritten (including, ideally, with a pause on evictions, foreclosures, bills, and other payments), allowing a comprehensive quarantine and contact-tracing regime to eliminate community spread of the virus from the country entirely, before turning to measures to keep it out afterward. Unfortunately, despite consistently robust polling throughout the winter, this idea has been made a political nonstarter in the United States ever since Biden preemptively ruled it out, with public health experts quickly following the president’s lead.