Things seem to be looking up as the US crosses into year three of the Covid-19 pandemic. Vaccines still do a good job of keeping people alive and out of the hospital. There's increasing access to tests and treatments. The numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths are heading in the right direction.
If living in a Covid world has taught us anything, however, it's that the coronavirus can surprise even the smartest public health experts, and the world certainly isn't out of the woods yet.
A new variant could easily develop and slip past the protection of current treatments and vaccines, setting us back to what life was like in 2020. That makes it hard to predict what happens next week, let alone in a few months.
However, based on what they're seeing now, here's what the experts think could happen in the next year of the pandemic. Each of these predictions has an unspoken "variant depending" at the end.