New COVID-19 cases are now falling across most of the country, and experts predict that the U.S. pandemic may finally be starting to peter out.

While the virus may never fully disappear, it is expected to become endemic — just another less dangerous and disruptive threat that humans coexist with.

“Barring something unexpected,” former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told the New York Times earlier this week, “I’m of the opinion that this is the last major wave of infection.”

The experts, of course, have been wrong about COVID before; even now, few are willing to rule out another sizable winter surge. The Times’s David Leonhardt noted that the virus