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But remember, the important number is not the breakthrough rate. It's the total number of severe cases, and that number went from 1,000 in the first town to just 100 in the next. That is progress by any definition. You're safer by far in town #2, where lots of people are vaccinated, and if you're one of them. Along with variants and breakthrough cases, waves--big spikes in the number of cases-- were not a surprise in and of themselves. We know from the history of previous pandemics that waves occur, yet countries in every region of the world were caught off guard by them. (I admit to having been surprised, as many people were, by the size of the delta wave in India in mid2021.) It was partly the result of wishful thinking--the mistaken idea that because they had contained the virus in the early days of 2020, that they could relax because it wasn't coming back. Another explanation is sadly ironic: Countries that do the best job of suppressing the virus early on will often be susceptible to later surges, because their suppression measures kept people from getting sick and developing natural immunity. Introduce an especially transmissible variant like Delta into an environment like that, and a big wave is almost inevitable. 5. Good science is messy, uncertain, and prone to change. Here's a partial list of the U.S. government's various positions on wearing masks during COVID: Feb. 29, 2020: The surgeon general tweets that people should "STOP BUYING MASKS" because they are "not preventing" COVID (which turned out not to be true) and buying them will make it harder for health workers to access them (which was true at the time, although it was fairly easy to make