If you are a time traveler recently arrived from 2019, you probably don’t think much has changed in the city of Boston. Even the Orange Line shutdown shouldn’t come as a surprise (new year, same MBTA). Some people are wearing masks, and ads on the subway encourage you to wash your hands and get vaccinated – but for the most part, things look as they did three years ago. Restaurants and bars are filled with people. Students have returned to college campuses. In-person events and activities are happening once again. This doesn’t mean we’ve rid ourselves of COVID-19: in fact, we may be approaching an “endemic” stage, at which point COVID looks like the flu.

COVID also continues to change. Boosters protecting against new variants of the virus are now available in the US. Scientists are not yet sure how much protection these boosters will offer, as there have been no clinical trials in humans, but animal studies and clinical trials of previous boosters have left vaccine developers optimistic. People 60 and older and those with weakened immune systems or chronic conditions will benefit most from the new vaccines. Immunologists recommend waiting four to six months after your last vaccine, booster, or COVID infection to maximize your immune response, although you can get the latest booster as early as two months after your last one.

Community-wide vaccination will help to fight the spread of COVID in the winter months. But we also need to take a longer-term view of the pandemic. Mortality decreased significantly during the Omicron wave, and the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center states that “the data trends clearly demonstrate that Omicron is a much less deadly variant, which is critical for downgrading COVID-19 to an endemic disease.” If COVID does become endemic, and recurs yearly like the flu, will we require annual vaccinations? It’s a possibility. Dr. Jeremy Luban, a virologist at UMass Chan Medical School, said last month, “I think it’s likely we’re going to end up going toward something like the situation with influenza virus, where at least people at risk for severe disease are going to require annual vaccination.”

Aside from its approaching endemic status, there are other signs we’ve reached a détente with the virus. Openings for remote positions are on the decline, and return-to-office mandates are proliferating. That doesn’t mean people will go back willingly – as of this summer, less than half the workers whose employers expected them to return to the office were going in five days a week, according to a study by the data-compiling business Coresignal. This isn’t solely because they’re afraid of the virus, but because many people have found working from home more productive and better for their work/life balance. A Pew Research Center report found that a large number of people want to continue working from home even after the pandemic. Still, pressure from employers and a cultural shift to pre-pandemic working environments may ultimately force the holdouts to go back to the office.

So, for our time traveler, things really do appear to be reaching pre-pandemic levels of normality. Appearances can be deceptive, of course. The pandemic has had long-lasting effects on our institutions and our collective psyche. Three years of limited in-person interaction drove more and more people to use social media for longer periods of time. Technology has become even more crucial to daily life, and in a country of simmering political tensions this can only mean a continued fracturing of reality, a funhouse mirror world in which what occurs online and in the media outgrows and begins to determine the physical reality we all took for granted. The US is heading towards a tumultuous midterm election period, and the 2024 presidential election is on the horizon. The pandemic has exacerbated the culture wars and destabilized our political infrastructure. How will we be able to handle another one? Since the beginning of recorded history, there have been close to 300 epidemics, many of which reached pandemic status. They are a feature of human life. We may want to believe that COVID was an aberration, but it will happen again. Will we be more prepared, given what we’ve gone through? Will we remember the lessons of this pandemic? We learn from studying history that humans do not learn very much from studying history. The lessons of the past will be forgotten, and the dark age is never very far off. Before we adapt to life with the virus, we perhaps need to adapt to this unfortunate fact of human psychology.