Two important things happened on May 13, 2021.

The first was that, according to a bulletin posted that day on the website of the American Hospital Association, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today updated its interim guidance stating that fully vaccinated people no longer need to wear a mask or physically distance in any setting, indoors or outdoors.” In practice, everyone did not rip their masks off and stop treating one another as disease vectors first instead of fellow human beings. That would take some time. It was almost a year before the mask mandate on planes in the U.S. actually went away, in April 2022. Over a year later, in May 2023, the Biden administration was still suing to overturn the judicial order that removed the mandate for air travel. Even now, from time to time, I still encounter a deadender in a mask at a concert or on the street. But May 2021 is when the tides began to turn and sanity began to return in practice.