The Simple Anti-COVID Measures We’re Not Taking

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Soon after, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Say you received $1 billion to spend on improving the world. How would you spend it? Why?

Email your thoughts to conor@theatlantic.com. I’ll publish a selection of correspondence in an upcoming newsletter.

Conversations of Note

After so many phases of the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve stopped trying to predict what the future holds, but I can attest to the splintering perspectives that Americans have about the present, as the United States closes in on 1 million deaths related to COVID-19, with hundreds still dying every day. “We have vaccines. We have boosters. Hospitalizations and deaths are way down from their peak. But this virus doesn’t appear to be done with us,” Nicholas Goldberg writes in the Los Angeles Times:

We all want our lives back.

So we tell ourselves there’s a level of ongoing death we can live with. That COVID is like the flu—endemic, not pandemic. That we’re vaxxed, and better yet boosted, and therefore we’re kind of, sort of, invulnerable. But eager as we may be for this to be over, now is a time to move slowly and avoid complacency. For one thing, ; only 45% has received even one booster. (In L.A. County, some 1.7 million people over age 5 haven’t received even a