The Most Likely Timeline for Life to Return to Normal

“Barring some variant that is just really crazy, I expect the summer to be a lot like the summer of 2019,” Andrew Noymer, a public-health professor at UC Irvine, told me. Based on the drop-off in cases and hospitalizations over the past few weeks, he thinks life could even be close to normal as soon as sometime in May. … Noymer’s prediction is that masking will be necessary in public settings until every American has at least been offered a vaccine, at which point he figures he would be okay with repealing mask mandates.