What the heck is happening with COVID right now?
Amid the chaos and controversy that followed a federal judge’s decision to strike down the U.S. mask mandate for travel earlier this week — a decision the Department of Justice is now appealing — it was easy to overlook the fact that mask policy wasn’t the only thing getting more perplexing by the day.
The pandemic itself has probably never been harder to parse.
On the one hand, cases have climbed in 41 states over the last two weeks, roused from their post-Omicron lows by an even more transmissible subvariant called BA.2.
On the other hand, BA.2 has been dominant in the U.S. for