Should I Just Get Omicron Over With?

For the past two years, Marie, a 30-something student in New York, had the right idea about COVID-19: She didn’t want to get it. Then, in the middle of December, as the antibody-dodging Omicron swept through her state, the coronavirus found her all the same. But Marie’s three vaccines helped keep her illness short and manageable. By year’s end, she and several of her friends had found themselves in a roughly similar spot, doing some of the same pandemic math: vaccine + vaccine + vaccine + infection = … surely a reasonable amount of safety, right?

So they threw a New Year’s party. At the close of December, 10 of them, all recently recovered from COVID and out of isolation, headed upstate for a maskless two-day bash. They were celebrating the start of 2022, but also the start of some kind