AS CASES RISE, A REMINDER: Most Americans have been wearing masks since spring, the C.D.C. says. But while masks aren’t worthless, the cloth “face coverings” that you see so often basically are. Surgical masks provide a modest amount of protection, at best, for the wearer and somewhat more for others. N95 masks provide substantial protection for the wearer, if worn properly. But a bandanna, or a cute cloth mask with your school logo on it, or a pulled-up neck gaiter, is basically just pandemic security theater. At most, they help keep you from touching your face, for whatever good that does. And masks don’t protect you if you don’t wear them, and most people in social situations don’t. (Even groups of employees at restaurants and stores usually pull their masks down when they gather to chat.)

Masks have been politicized as useless by some, and as magical talismans by others. They’re merely a tool, moderately useful at best. Cases are going up because that’s what happens in a pandemic until enough people have had the disease that it can’t sustain transmission. My guess is, we’ll reach that point before the vaccines are in wide distribution, notwithstanding the enormous dispatch with which Operation Warp Speed produced multiple vaccines.