Plus, the holidays are upon us, which means a spike in gatherings of people who do not otherwise see one another. Such get-togethers, especially if they are multigenerational, can spark more outbreaks. I take no joy in saying this, but all of this means that any gathering outside one’s existing quarantine pod should be avoided for now—especially if it is indoors. Think of it as a postponement and plan to hold it later. Better a late Christmas than an early medical catastrophe. Pods should not expand unless absolutely necessary. Order takeout instead of dining indoors. Make game night virtual. Shop in bulk, so you can do fewer trips to the store. It’s not the right time for wedding receptions or birthday parties.

All of this means we desperately need to flatten the curve again before hospitals nationwide are overrun. Utah, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, and other states are already reporting that hospitals and intensive-care units are at or near capacity. The bottleneck for medical care isn’t just lack of space, or even equipment, which we may be able to increase, but staff—trained nurses and doctors who can attend to patients, and who cannot be manufactured out of thin air. During the spring crisis in the New York tristate area, health-care workers from around the country rushed to the region, buttressing the exhausted medical workforce. With a nationwide surge, doctors and nurses are needed in their hometown hospitals.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine—or Moderna’s vaccine—may be available in the United States to health-care workers and other high-priority people as early as the end of this year. But it won’t be distributed widely until well into 2021, even in the best-case scenario—and the Pfizer vaccine needs two doses, about 21 days apart.

This is not a “casedemic”—the false notion that we just have better testing and detection, without any real change in the underlying risk for illness and death. It’s true that we missed a lot of cases in the spring because we didn’t have enough tests, and that we are catching more of them now. But it’s not just confirmed cases that are on the rise.

And worse, we are entering this dreadful period without the kind of leadership or preparation we need, and with baseline numbers that will make it difficult to avoid a dramatic rise in hospitalizations, deaths, and potential long-term effects on survivors.

Doctors and nurses have much more expertise in managing cases even in using nonmedical interventions like proning, which can improve patients’ breathing capacity simply by positioning them facedown. Health-care workers are also practicing fortified infection-control protocols, including universal masking in medical settingsOur testing capacity has greatly expanded, and people are getting their results much more quickly. We may soon get cheaper, saliva-based rapid tests that people can administer on their own, itself a potential game changer.

Pfizer and BioNTech have announced a stunning success rate in their early Phase 3 vaccine trials—if it holds up, it will be a game changer. Treatments have gotten better too. A monoclonal antibody drug—similar to what President Donald Trump and the former Governor Chris Christie received—just earned emergency-use authorization from the FDA. Dexamethasone—a cheap, generic corticosteroid—cut the death rate by a third for severe COVID-19 cases in a clinical trial.

Good news is arriving on almost every front: treatments, vaccines, and our understanding of this coronavirus.