After throwing >600,000 bodies at the pandemic, the U.S. has declared victory and retreated from social distancing. That’s about to cost it—and the world.

(Originally published July 1 in “What in the World“) A friend of mine recently sent me Bloomberg’s rankings of countries by something called “Covid resilience.” A major component of this ranking is to what extent the country is under lockdown, the logic apparently being that if your country emerges from lockdown, then it must have successfully mitigated the pandemic. So, absurdly, the rankings are topped by the U.S., the country that has done arguably the worst in handling Covid—particularly given the fact that it is one of the world’s most developed, wealthiest nations.

This logic is clearly flawed, and the U.S. proves it. Covid has killed almost 620,000 people in the United States so far, roughly equivalent to the number of soldiers killed in the Civil War. That’s a poignant toll, considering that the pandemic has only reinforced the economic, political, racial and social divisions that have rendered the U.S. one of the world’s greatest sources of uncertainty and risk. David Brooks summed it up well in his May piece, “Our Pathetic Herd Immunity Failure.”

State after state is lifting its pandemic restrictions as the U.S. prepares to “reopen” this week in time for its July 4 celebration of Independence from Britain. And yet if you want a sense of where the U.S. is headed, there’s no better place to look. The United Kingdom also thought it had seen the back of the pandemic. Streets were filled with revelers and lager louts were venturing off to Portugal to beat each other senseless. Summer holidays to Spain were booked. Pubs were filled. Then the delta variant hit. And despite the fact that the U.K. has managed to give at least 65% of its population at least one inoculation, it has had to batten the hatches back down until—it hopes—it can reopen July 19. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. In the meantime, the U.K. is still recording more than 2,700 new cases per million inhabitants ever fortnight, a rough gauge of incidence there. That has put it back into the ranks of the countries faced with the highest infection rates.

The good news for the U.K. is that deaths haven’t picked back up along with infections, sparking some to say the country can afford to ignore the delta variant and “learn to live with” the virus. This phrase is starting to pop up in many countries, as they realize that achieving zero cases is a near-impossibility. And, as this column has argued before, it doesn’t make sense for countries with just a handful of infections to stay completely shuttered. But on the other hand, it doesn’t make sense for countries with high, and rising, infection rates to simply decide the effort isn’t worth it and give up the fight. Yet that’s what the U.K. and the U.S. seem to be leaning towards, even as authorities in the U.S. recognize an alarming surge in delta-variant cases. And the U.S. has only managed to give one inoculation to 54% of its population. But it’s easier to ignore a renewed surge now, since it is confined largely to the portions of the country where masks and vaccinations were considered political anathema. It’s being met with a collective shrug in more liberal parts of America: those folks have it coming.

That’s a curious political calculus, but one it seems the American public at least is now willing to contemplate. There clearly is a certain death toll Americans are willing to exchange in return for freedom of movement. And one can argue that we already tolerate that death toll on an ongoing basis with other viruses, like the flu, as well as other risks, like lightning strikes. As we learn how to better treat Covid patients, the mortality rate will fall to something more acceptable and we can move on. And one can argue that the more the virus mutates, the more rapidly it will achieve a more tolerable form that doesn’t kill its hosts. After all, a fatal virus isn’t a successful virus.

The problem is that we’re not there yet with Covid. Mortality rates are still high, and mutations keep turning up more infectious strains that are at least as debilitating as Covid 1.0. Just ask India, which is only now recovering from its outbreak of the strain-formerly-known-as-India.

What’s worse, however, is that surrendering to endemic Covid this early in the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere will create reservoirs for new mututions. Big reservoirs. Letting Covid percolate around a country as large as the U.S., even among the 46% of its population that isn’t vaccinated, provides Covid with a laboratory of at least 119 million individuals to try out new and deadlier strains. Those mutations may no longer pose much challenge to healthcare systems in rich, developed countries that have decided a trip to the bar is worth a few grannies and diabetics. But they’re likely to wreak havoc in countries with weaker healthcare systems like India, Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa.

During the Cold War, the U.S. convinced voters they needed to fight Communism in Vietnam by arguing that if they didn’t combat the Red Menace in the jungles of Vietnam, they’d have to fight the Communists on the beaches of California. Now we face the opposite threat: If Americans fail to fight Covid on the beaches of California, we’ll end up fighting Covid in the jungles of Brazil.