Yasmin Tayag

Over the past month, the number of new COVID cases in my social circle has become impossible to ignore. I brushed off the first few—guests at a wedding I attended in early April—as outliers during the post-Omicron lull. But then came frantic texts from two former colleagues. The next week, a friend at the local café was complaining that she’d lost her sense of smell. My Instagram feed is now surfacing selfies of people in isolation, some for the second or third time.

Well, here we are again. After our fleeting brush with normalcy during Omicron’s retreat, another very transmissible new version of the coronavirus is on the rise—and with it, a fresh wave of vacillation between mask-donning and mask-doffing.The Omicron offshoot BA.2 is now the dominant variant around the world and in the United States. Case counts are rising in a number of states. It’s too early to tell whether BA.

Well, here we are again. After our fleeting brush with normalcy during Omicron’s retreat, another very transmissible new version of the coronavirus is on the rise—and with it, a fresh wave of vacillation between mask-donning and mask-doffing.The Omicron offshoot BA.2 is now the dominant variant around the world and in the United States. Case counts are rising in a number of states. It’s too early to tell whether BA.

Of all the pandemic waves the United States has weathered so far, this one feels uniquely baffling. Omicron is on its way out, and states are relaxing their mask mandates, but close to 200,000 people are still testing positive each day. The country is more vaccinated than ever before, but not vaccinated enough to stop hospitals from filling up with COVID patients. And while we’re still dealing with this variant, another one capable of breaking through those defenses could still emerge.

My breakthrough infection started with a scratchy throat just a few days before Thanksgiving. Because I’m vaccinated, and had just tested negative for COVID-19 two days earlier, I initially brushed off the symptoms as merely a cold. Just to be sure, I got checked again a few days later. Positive. The result felt like a betrayal after 18 months of reporting on the pandemic. And as I walked home from the testing center, I realized that I had no clue what to do next.

The fear of breakthrough COVID-19 infections spoiled the summer. In the early days of vaccine bliss, many Americans had thought that the shots were a ticket to normalcy—and at least for a while, that’s precisely what public-health experts were telling us: Sure, it was still possible for vaccinated people to get COVID-19, but you wouldn’t have to worry much about spreading it to anyone else.

Every time I leave my apartment, I grab a mask from the stack by the door. After all these months of pandemic life, I’ve amassed a pretty big collection: Some are embroidered, while others bear the faded logos of the New York Public Library or the TV show Nailed It. What all of them have in common is that they’re made of cloth.At this point, cloth masks are so ubiquitous in the United States that it can be easy to forget that they were originally supposed to be a stopgap measure.