I'm so fuckin' tired of this timeline.
What we should do is set up some threshold of hospitalizations (and/or rate of hospitalizations) that inform our behavior. Ideally, it would be federally issued, but extend down to state and municipal levels, to target localized spikes in cases. Of course the GOP governors would not enforce any restrictions, but even just clearly communicating some criteria and recommended behavior for worsening statistics would be progress. But nope, everyone's still either freaking out about the next variant, or still completely ignoring the existence of covid altogether.
And what would have been the point of me getting my covid infection sequenced to find out what variant it was? Some peace of mind and maybe not masking as much for... three months? Until BA.6 comes along?