More uniformly infectious, more treatable, more genetically predictable: How coronavirus is getting closer to flu

Hours after a federal judge struck down the federal mask mandate covering air travel and other public transportation last month, Delta Airlines celebrated the move in a statement saying that Covid-19 “has transitioned to an ordinary seasonal virus.” By the next day, after an intense backlash from public health experts, Delta had taken the offending language down. “‘Ordinary viruses don’t cause 1 million deaths in one country in just 2 years,” tweeted epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera, a senior adviser at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute. SARS-CoV-2 remains a long way from being ordinary. It has not yet found seasonal cadence — take the recent surge in Europe and the U.K., which comes just weeks after the initial Omicron wave subsided — and it’s still capable of inflicting mass death and disability (see Hong Kong’s lethal last few months).