The 2016 presidential election will never die—or, at the very least, we appear doomed to discuss it forever. Earlier this month, NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics published a study in Nature Communications that complicates one purported element of Donald Trump’s ascension: the influence of Russian Twitter trolls. The researchers looked at roughly 1.2 billion tweets from the lead-up to the 2016 election. They sought to quantify just how many ordinary U.S. Twitter users were exposed to Russian accounts, and to better understand how that exposure did or did not change users’ political attitudes and voting behavior.

One of their findings quickly made headlines, although not in a way they intended. The researchers determined that Russian troll accounts on Twitter demonstrated little ability to change voter behavior. The majority of U.S. Twitter users surveyed were simply not exposed to posts from the Internet Research Agency, Russia’s troll farm. And many of the ones who were self-identified as highly partisan Republicans—people who seemed likely to vote for Trump anyway.

So far, so good. In hindsight, the findings seem logical: Simply seeing a few random tweets from Russians pretending to be angry, partisan Americans isn’t the sort of thing that causes somebody to drop everything and reconsider their politics. But plenty of diehards are still relitigating the 2016 outcome. The study has been weaponized and its findings distorted or downplayed, depending on one’s political views. As with so many well-meaning efforts to understand the effect of digital platforms on our politics, the nuance of the work has been once again flattened and corrupted by the incentives of those very same platforms.  

For instance, Glenn Greenwald tweeted the study as proof that “Russiagate” was “one of the most deranged and unhinged conspiracy theories in modern times.” Breitbart definitively declared, “Democrat Narrative Falls Apart: Study Finds Russian Trolls Had Little Influence on 2016 Voters.’” NYU’s center and its authors attempted to correct the record with a Twitter thread, to little effect (their thread has been retweeted fewer than 60 times; Greenwald’s received nearly 5,000 retweets and 1.7 million views).

To its credit, the research is full of caveats. Its authors note that the study covers only Twitter’s social-network domain and leaves out much bigger platforms, such as Facebook. Similarly, they argue that the study does not address other prongs of Russia’s documented efforts to meddle in the election, including its email-hacking campaigns targeting the Democratic National Committee and people connected to Hillary Clinton, which were leaked and covered by national media. Josh Tucker, one of the report’s authors, told me repeatedly that the study was just a small piece of a complicated puzzle and did not suggest that Russian efforts had no effect on the 2016 outcome. “The entire paper is predicated on the fact that Russians tried to interfere in the 2016 election, which I take as a serious national-security issue,” he said.

The research is part of a trend. In recent years, there’s been pushback on the way #resistance tweeters and even mainstream news outlets have used Russian “bots” or trolls as an easy scapegoat to help explain both the provenance of successful right-wing narratives and some of the popular support for MAGA Republicans. Journalists such as Michael Lewis and the French reporter Anthony Mansuy have also gone back to reexamine the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, questioning the notion that the company’s psychographic profiling and targeting meaningfully swayed the election results. It all serves to illustrate that the result of the 2016 election is far more complicated than any single factor can explain.

[Read: Is Gmail silencing Republicans?]

“I have mixed feelings about this,” Tucker told me when I asked him about how he thought his study might fit into this broader reappraisal. “We had a geopolitical rival trying to interfere in an election, and that was real and serious. This was not something that should’ve been swept under the rug.” But, he added, “campaigns spend billions to try and do this, so why are we sure some tweets moved the needle?”

And Tucker gestured toward an unintended consequence of the study: “I worry that we spent four years thinking about the fragility of American elections and how easy it is to change the outcome, and that makes the soil more fertile for claims of the illegitimacy of elected candidates.”

Russia’s attempts to meddle were not confined to Twitter. In 2017, Facebook estimated that 126 million users may have viewed Russian-sponsored posts, as opposed to 32 million who, according to the Nature study, were exposed on Twitter. Scholars such as Kathleen Hall Jamieson have done extensive work suggesting that Russia’s email hack-and-leak operation, aided by media amplification, was likely a contributing factor in the electoral outcome. It’s foolish to suggest that a few troll tweets swung the 2016 election, but it’s also unwise to dismiss a multipronged attempt to disrupt the American democratic because of this one study.

“What [the research shows] is this is an important piece of the larger 2016 puzzle,” Kate Starbird, a co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, told me. She explained that the study only confirms what media-studies scholars have long known: that one piece of targeted information or propaganda rarely changes one’s opinion. (That idea is known as the “hypodermic needle effect.”) More likely, people are influenced by ideas that travel to mass media, and then by convincing personalities who repackage and disseminate that information. The NYU study doesn’t factor in this indirect exposure, she argues, which would include things like troll tweets embedded into news articles that are then shared across the internet. “Just because we can’t measure impact doesn’t mean there isn’t impact,” Starbird said.

It’s easy to blame overly credulous media or various pundits and researchers for simplifying the complex election interference narrative down to “Russia did it,” but it’s also important to remember how primed many Americans were to believe in the power of social networks to manipulate user emotions and shape public opinion. In 2014, Facebook faced intense backlash and generated tons of headlines over a study in which researchers said they had manipulated the emotional state of nearly 700,000 users. Two years before that study, Facebook released research purportedly demonstrating the power of its digital I Voted stickers to increase voter turnout. A credulous public and press took company claims about platforms’ ability to influence behavior at face value. So it makes sense that, in the aftermath of Clinton’s surprising defeat, people latched onto a simple narrative. People may have freaked out, but they didn’t do so without reason.

If this all sounds mealy-mouthed and frustrating and inconclusive, it’s because studying the flow of information across dozens of open and closed ecosystems and assessing the impact is exceedingly difficult. Ten thousand analyses and reappraisals will never provide a smoking gun that we can point to as the exact reason the 2016 election turned out as it did. “It’s a complicated story,” Starbird told me. “It’s always been a complicated story. If this study or any other makes it look simple, that’s a mistake we’re making.”

We’re still struggling to incorporate that complexity into our broader understanding of how social platforms affect elections, and in that case the NYU study does not offer any heartening signs. The thoughtful context provided by digital forensics is immediately drowned out by the very information ecosystem it’s trying to demystify. Few minds are changed. More than six years after the 2016 election, we don’t really know the impact of Russian meddling except that angry, conspiratorially minded Americans continue to fight over whether it happened and to what extent it mattered. Maybe that’s proof enough that the trolls succeeded—if not in annihilating our democratic system, then at least in making so many of us trust it and one another less.

For months, the winter forecast in the United States seemed to be nothing but viral storm clouds. A gale of RSV swept in at the start of autumn, sickening infants and children in droves and flooding ICUs. After a multiyear hiatus, flu, too, returned in force, before many Americans received their annual shot. And a new set of fast-spreading SARS-CoV-2 subvariants had begun its creep around the world. Experts braced for impact: “My biggest concern was hospital capacity,” says Katelyn Jetelina, who writes the popular public-health-focused Substack Your Local Epidemiologist. “If flu, RSV, and COVID were all surging at the same time—given how burned out, how understaffed our hospital systems are right now—how would that pan out?”

But the season’s worst-case scenario—what some called a “tripledemic,” bad enough to make health-care systems crumble—has not yet come to pass. Unlike last year, and the year before, a hurricane of COVID hospitalizations and deaths did not slam the country during the first month of winter; flu and RSV now appear to be in sustained retreat. Even pediatric hospitals, fresh off what many described as their most harrowing respiratory season in memory, finally have some respite, says Mary Beth Miotto, a pediatrician and the president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. After a horrific stint, “we are, right now, doing okay.” With two months to go until spring, there is plenty of time for another crisis to emerge: Certain types of influenza, in particular, can be prone to delivering late-season second peaks. “We need to be careful and recognize we’re still in the middle,” Jetelina told me. But so far, this winter “has not been as bad as I expected it to be.”

No matter what’s ahead, this respiratory season certainly won’t go down in history as a good one. Children across the country have fallen sick in overwhelming numbers, many of them with multiple respiratory viruses at once, amid a nationwide shortage of pediatric meds. SARS-CoV-2 remains a top cause of mortality, with its daily death count still in the hundreds, and long COVID continues to be difficult to prevent or treat. And enthusiasm for new vaccines and virus-blocking mitigations seems to be at an all-time low. Any sense of relief people might be feeling at this juncture must be tempered by what’s in the rearview: three years of an ongoing pandemic that has left more than 1 million people dead in the U.S. alone, and countless others sick, many chronically so. The winter may be going better than it could have. But that shouldn’t hold us back from tackling what’s ahead this season, and in others yet to come.

Not all of this past autumn’s gloomy predictions were off base. RSV and flu each rushed in on the early side of the season and led to a steep rise in cases. But both viruses made rather hasty exits: RSV hit an apparent apex in mid-November, and flu bent into its own decline the following month. The staggered peaks “helped us quite a bit, in terms of hospitals being stressed,” says Sam Scarpino, the director of AI and life sciences at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. In recent days, coronavirus cases and hospitalizations have been tilting downward, too—and severe-disease rates seem to be holding at a relative low. Just under 5 percent of hospital beds are currently occupied by COVID patients, compared with more than four times that fraction this time last year. And weekly COVID deaths are down by almost 75 percent from January 2022. (Death, though, has always been a lagging indicator, and the mortality numbers could still shift upward soon.) Despite some dire predictions to the contrary, the fast-spreading XBB.1.5 subvariant didn’t spark “some giant Omicron-type wave and crush everything,” says Justin Lessler, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “In that sense, I feel good.”

[Read: How worried should we be about XBB.1.5?]

No one can say for sure why we dodged winter’s deadliest bullets, but the population-level immunity that Americans have built up over the past three years clearly played a major role. “That’s a testament to how vaccination has made the disease less dangerous for most people,” says Cedric Dark, an emergency physician at Baylor College of Medicine. Widespread immunization, combined with the fact that most Americans have now been infected, and many of them reinfected, has caused severe-disease rates to plunge, and the virus to move less quickly than it otherwise would have. Antiviral drugs, too, have been slashing hospitalization rates, at least for the meager fraction of recently infected people who use them. The gargantuan asterisk of long COVID still applies to new infections, but the short-term effects of the disease are now more on par with those of other respiratory illnesses, reducing the number of resources that health-care workers must marshal for each case.

The virus, too, was more merciful than it could have been. XBB.1.5, despite its high transmissibility and penchant for dodging antibodies, doesn’t so far seem more capable of causing severe disease. And the fall’s bivalent shots, though not a perfect match for the newcomer, still improve the body’s response to viruses in the Omicron clan. Competition among respiratory viruses may have also helped soften COVID’s recent blows. In the days and weeks after one infection, bodies can become more resilient to another—a phenomenon known as viral interference that can reduce the risk of simultaneous or back-to-back infections. On population scales, interference can push down surges’ peaks, or at the very least, separate them, potentially keeping hospitals from being hit by a medley of microbes all at once. It’s hard to say for sure: “Many things go into when an epidemic wave happens—human behavior, temperature, humidity, the biology of the virus, the biology of the host,” says Ellen Foxman, an immunologist at Yale. That said, “I do think viral interference probably does play a role that has not been appreciated.”

None of the experts I spoke with was ready to issue a blanket phew. Overlapping waves of respiratory illness have already led to nonstop sickness, especially among children, draining resources at every point in the pediatric caregiving chain. Kids were kept out of school, and parents stayed home from work; after a glut of COVID-related closures in New Mexico, schools and day cares running low on teachers had to call in the National Guard. Inundated with illnesses, pediatric emergency rooms overflowed; adult-care units had to be repurposed for children, and some hospitals pitched tents on their front lawns to accommodate overflow. Local stopgaps weren’t always enough: At one point, a colleague of Miotto’s in Boston told her that the closest available pediatric ICU bed was in Washington, D.C.

[Read: The worst pediatric-care crisis in decades]

By any metric, for the pediatric community, “it’s been a horrible season, the worst,” says Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician at Stanford. “The hospitals were bursting, bursting at the seams.” The flow of fevers has ebbed somewhat in recent weeks, but remains more flood than trickle. “It’s not over: We still don’t have amoxicillin in general, and we still struggle to get fever medication for people,” Miotto said. A parent recently told her that they’d gone to almost 10 pharmacies to try to fill an antibiotic prescription for their child. And pediatric providers across the country are steeling themselves for what the coming weeks could bring. “I think we could still see another surge,” says Joelle Simpson, the division chief of emergency medicine at Children’s National Hospital. “In prior years, February has been one of the worst months.”

The season’s ongoing woes have been compounded by preexisting health-care shortages. Amid a dearth of funds, some hospitals have reduced their number of pediatric beds; a mass exodus of workers has also limited the resources that can be doled out, even as SARS-CoV-2 testing and isolation protocols continue to stretch the admission and discharge timeline. “Hospitals are in a weaker position than they were before the pandemic,” says Joseph Kanter, Louisiana’s state health officer and medical director. “If that’s the environment in which we are experiencing this year’s respiratory-virus season, it makes everything feel more acute.” Those issues are not limited to pediatrics: Now that COVID is a regular part of the disease roster, workloads have increased for a contingent of beleaguered clinicians that, across the board, seems likely to continue to shrink. In many hospitals, patients are getting stuck in emergency departments for several hours, even multiple days—sometimes never making it to a bed before being sent home. “It seems like hospitals everywhere are full,” Dark told me, not just because of COVID, but because of everything. “The vast majority of the work I do, and that I bet you what most of my colleagues are doing, is taking place in waiting rooms.”

The U.S. has come a long way in the past three years. But still, “the cumulative toll of these winter surges has been higher than it needs to be,” says Julia Raifman, a health-policy researcher at Boston University. Had more people gone into winter up to date on their COVID vaccines, the virus’s mortality rate could have been driven down further; had more antiviral drugs and other protections been prioritized for the elderly and immunocompromised, fewer people might have been imperiled at all. If relief is percolating across the country right now, that says more about a shift in standards than anything else. “Our threshold for what ‘bad’ looks like has just gotten so out of whack,” Simpson told me. This winter could have been as grim as recent ones, Scarpino told me, with body-filled freezer trucks in parking lots and hospitals on the brink of collapse. But an improvement from those horrific lows isn’t much to brag about. And this winter—three years into combatting a coronavirus for which we have shots, drugs, masks, and more—has been nowhere close to the best one imaginable.

The concern now, experts told me, is that the U.S. might accept a winter like this one as simply good enough. Regular vaccine uptake could dwindle even further; another wild-card SARS-CoV-2 variant could ignite another conflagration of cases. If that did happen, some researchers worry that we’d be slow to notice: Genomic surveillance is down, and many tests are being taken, unreported, at home. And with so many different immune histories now scattered across the globe, it’s getting tougher for modelers like Lessler to predict where and how quickly new variants might take over.

The country does have a few factors working in its favor. By next winter, at least one RSV vaccine will almost certainly be available to protect the population’s youngest, eldest, or both. mRNA-based flu vaccines, which are expected to be far faster to develop than currently available shots, are also in the works, and will likely make it easier to match doses to circulating strains. And if, as Foxman hopes, SARS-CoV-2 eventually settles into a more predictable, seasonal pattern, infections will be less of a concern for most of the year and season-specific immunizations could be easier to design.

[Read: Should everyone be masking again?]

But no vaccine will do much unless enough people are willing and able to take it—and the public-health infrastructure that’s led many outreach efforts remains underfunded and understaffed. Kanter worries that the nation may not be terribly willing to invest. “We’ve fallen into this complacency trap where we just accept a given amount of mortality every year as unavoidable,” he told me. It doesn’t have to be that way, as the past few years have shown: Treatments, vaccines, clean indoor air, and other measures can lower a respiratory virus’s toll.

By the middle of spring, the U.S. will be in a position to let the public-health-emergency declaration on COVID lapse—a decision that could roll back protections for the uninsured, and ratchet up price points on shots and antivirals. This winter’s retrospective is likely to influence that decision, Scarpino told me. But relief can breed complacency, and complacency further slows a sluggish public-health response. The fate of next winter—and of every winter after that—will depend on whether the U.S. decides to view this season as a success, or to recognize it as a shaky template for well-being that can and should be improved.

Last month, I ran a tiny media experiment in my own home: I recorded all of the toy commercials that my 3-year-old daughter watched in a one-week period, looking for patterns in how she was being advertised to. What I saw in those 28 ads was like something dreamed up in a Mad Men–era boardroom: girls preparing plastic food, boys gripping monster-themed action figures. Researchers told me that such gendered toy marketing shapes how kids play—and what they learn.

Across the roughly eight hours of content we watched together—all of it Nickelodeon programs aimed at kids 2 and older—68 percent of the toy commercials foregrounded either only girls or only boys playing with the product. The all-girl commercials tended to use pastel colors, or pinks and purples; they mostly advertised dolls and plush toys, and products related to beauty and fashion. The all-boy commercials, in contrast, drew on colors such as yellow, green, red, and blue. Many of them promoted toys based on characters from video games—a Mario action figure, for instance, was tasked with rescuing Princess Peach—or toys related to transportation or adventure.

About 32 percent of the ads featured both boys and girls, but even some of those relied on lazy gender stereotypes. One advertisement for a kids’ camera showed boys playing with a blue version and girls playing with a pink one.

[Read: The princess revolution]

This clear gender divide doesn’t reflect how my daughter actually likes to play. Her Christmas gifts included a pop-up soccer goal, a Spider-Man costume, and a purple, sparkly unicorn dress—and she loved all of them. Rather than limiting her to conventional “girls’ toys”—baby dolls, pink play ovens, tea sets—my husband and I let her form her own tastes. This isn’t a heroic or even unusual stance: In one 2017 Pew Research poll, 76 percent of respondents said it’s a good thing for parents to encourage their daughters to play with toys associated with boys; 64 percent said the same about encouraging boys to play with toys associated with girls. But toy companies apparently haven’t gotten the memo.

Admittedly, my analysis isn’t very scientific; it only shows what one toddler saw in a given week. And it doesn’t take into account the chaotic advertising environment where many kids now watch programming—YouTube. In some ways, toy marketing is less gendered now than in the past: Big-box retailers such as Target are doing away with pink and blue toy aisles, and brands such as Disney no longer explicitly categorize their products as “for girls” or “for boys.” But researchers told me that many toys are still packaged and marketed using implicitly gendered cues—and kids still pick up on those associations. Lisa Dinella, a psychology professor at Monmouth University who researches toys and gender, puts it this way: “If a kid watches a commercial where a little girl is nurturing a doll and there’s not a boy to be seen, that’s sending them the message that this toy is for girls.”

I certainly don’t mind my daughter playing with toys that are stereotypically associated with girls; I wouldn’t want to overcorrect and deprive her of the fun and learning those toys offer. But I hope that when she uses them, it’s not at the expense of all other toys. Really, I just want her to be able to decide how she plays without excessive influence. I want that for all kids.

After all, decades of early-childhood-development research have shown that a toy isn’t simply a toy. “Play leads to learning, and learning leads to life choices,” Dinella told me. So when entire categories of toys feel off-limits to kids of a particular gender, they are denied the developmental opportunities those toys provide. Boys, for example, are more likely than girls to play with building blocks and puzzles—and research suggests that that kind of play might be linked to gender differences in spatial abilities. Girls, for their part, are more likely to play with toys such as dolls, which may be associated with social skills like comforting—skills that most parents want to foster in their children, regardless of their gender.

[Read: How to play like a girl]

Christia Spears Brown, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky who studies how children learn stereotypes, points out that the toys themselves aren’t inherently gendered. Marketing them in a gendered way, though, is an effective strategy for toy brands. For one thing, it allows them to create slightly different versions of what is essentially the same toy. Take that camera sold in blue and pink: If you have a son and a daughter, you might feel that you’re on the hook to buy one of each rather than a single one for them to share. That’s a common tactic, Brown told me. And more broadly, advertising campaigns tend to be successful when they target highly specific audiences.

That’s the crux of the issue: It doesn’t really matter what parents say they want for their kids, or what research tells us might be best for them. “The goal of toy manufacturers isn’t to promote healthy child development; their goal is to sell products,” Susan Linn, a psychologist and the founder of Fairplay, a nonprofit advocating against advertising directed at children, told me. “Companies gender-stereotype because it’s lucrative.”

What’s a parent to do in response to a multibillion-dollar toy industry? Stopping kids from seeing gendered commercials feels like swimming against the tide. Rather than trying to censor the content, Brown thinks we’d be better off educating our kids. “Instead of giving them blinders, give them a shield,” she told me, “so that they can interpret it as a stereotyped message instead of interpreting it as ‘Oh, this is the way things are supposed to be.’”

Even parents of very young children can use that approach. I told Brown about one particularly irksome commercial for a toy nail salon that featured tween girls in pink and sequins. Just a few weeks before we watched it, my nephew had proudly showed his multicolored nails to my daughter. Now, I wondered, would she think nail-painting wasn’t for him? She’s at a formative age, just starting to pick up on the concept of gender. But Brown reassured me: You don’t need to have a conversation “about the patriarchy” with a 3-year-old. She suggested just slipping in short statements at opportune times. I could have said, for instance, “I bet boys would also like to paint their nails!’”

Plenty of parents, she pointed out, already take little moments to introduce their kids to big concepts—kindness, respect, resilience. Grown-ups can also provide antidotes to harmful marketing messages “in microdoses, to help kids understand the world in which they’re living.”

Over the past week, my breakfast routine has been scrambled. I have had overnight oats, beans on sourdough, corned-beef hash and fried rice, and, on a particularly weird morning, leftover cream-of-broccoli soup. Under normal circumstances, I would be eating eggs. But right now, I’m in hoarding mode, jealously guarding the four that remain from a carton purchased indignantly for six dollars. For that price—50 damn cents each!—my daily sunny-side-up eggs will have to wait. The perfect moment beckons: Maybe a toasted slab of brioche will call for a luxurious soft scramble, or maybe I will cave to a powerful craving for an egg-salad sandwich.

Eggs, that quintessential cheap food, have gotten very, very expensive in the United States. In December, the average price for a dozen eggs in U.S. cities hit an all-time high of $4.25, up from $1.78 a year earlier. Although the worst now seems to be behind us, there’s still a ways to go before consumer prices hit reasonable levels—and Americans are starting to crack. Online, the shortage has recently hatched endless memes: In some posts, people pretend to portion out eggs in plastic baggies, like drug dealers (Pablo Eggscobar, anyone?); another recurring bit suggests painting potatoes to hunt at Easter. The high prices have even led to egg smuggling and raised the profile of “rent-a-chicken” services, where customers can borrow hens, chicken feed, and a coop for a couple hundred bucks.

Surging egg prices are partly a familiar story of pandemic-era inflation. Producing eggs costs more because fuel, transportation, feed, and packaging are more expensive now, Jada Thompson, an agricultural economist at the University of Arkansas, told me. And it doesn’t help that there are no great substitutes for eggs. But a big reason prices are so high right now is the avian flu—a virus that infects many types of birds and is deadly for some. Right now, we’re facing the worst-ever wave in the U.S.; it has decimated chicken flocks and dented America’s egg inventory. Over just the past year, more than 57 million birds have died from the flu. Some much-needed relief from sky-high egg prices is likely coming, but don’t break out the soufflé pans yet. All signs suggest that avian flu is here to stay. If such rampant spread of the virus continues, “these costs are not going to come down to pre-2022 levels,” Thompson told me. Cheap eggs may soon become a thing of the past.

This isn’t the first time American egg producers have encountered the avian flu, but dealing with it is still a challenge. For one thing, the virus keeps changing. It has long infected but not killed waterfowl and shorebirds, such as ducks and geese, but by 1996, it had mutated into the “highly pathogenic” H5N1, a poultry-killing strain that is named for the nasty versions of its “H” and “N” proteins. (They form spikes on the virus’s surface—sound familiar?) In 2014 and 2015, H5N1 ignited a terrible outbreak of avian flu, which gave U.S. poultry farmers their first taste of just how bad egg shortages could get.

But this outbreak is like nothing we’ve seen before. The strain of avian flu that’s behind this wave is indeed new, and in the U.S., the virus has been circulating for a full year now—far longer than during the last big outbreak. The virus has become “host-adapted,” meaning that it can infect its natural hosts without killing them; as a result, wild waterfowl are ruthlessly efficient at spreading the virus to chickens, Richard Webby, the director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds, told me.

Many of these wild birds are migratory, and during their long journeys between Canada and South America, they descend on waterways and poop virus from the sky over poultry farms. Chickens stand no chance: The fleshy flaps on their heads may turn blue, their eyes and neck may swell, and, in rare instances, paralysis occurs. An entire poultry flock can be wiped out in 48 hours. Death is swift and vicious.

Everything about this current wave has aligned to put a serious dent in our egg supply. Most eggs in the United States are hatched in jam-packed industrial egg farms, where transmission is next to impossible to stop, so the go-to move when the flu is detected is to “depopulate,” the preferred industry term for killing all of the birds. Without such a brutal tactic, Bryan Richards, the emerging-disease coordinator at the U.S. Geological Survey, told me, the current wave would be much worse.

But this strategy also means fewer eggs, at least until new chicks grow into hens. That takes about six months, so there just haven’t been enough hens lately—especially for all the holiday baking people wanted to do, Thompson said. By the end of 2022, the U.S. egg inventory was 29 percent lower than it had been at the beginning of the year. The chicken supply, in contrast, is robust, because avian flu tends to affect older birds, like egg layers, Thompson said; at six to eight weeks old, the birds we eat, known as broilers, are not as susceptible. Also, she added, wild-bird migration pathways are not as concentrated in the Southeast, where most broiler production happens.

Egg eaters should be able to return to their normal breakfast routines soon enough. New hens are now replenishing the U.S. egg supply—while waterfowl are wintering in the warmer climes of South America rather than lingering in the United States. Since the holidays, “the price paid to the farmers for eggs has been decreasing rapidly, and usually, in time, the consumer price follows,” Maro Ibarburu, a business analyst at Iowa State University’s Egg Industry Center, told me.

Still, going forward, it may be worth rethinking our relationship with eggs. There’s no guarantee that eggs will go back to being one the cheapest and most nutritious foods. When the weather warms, the birds will return, and “it’s highly likely that upon spring migration, we could see yet another wave,” Richards said. Europe, which experienced the H5N1 wave about six months before the Americas did, offers a glimpse of the future. “They went from being in a situation where the virus would come and go to a position where, essentially, it came and stayed,” Webby told me. If we’re lucky, though, birds will develop a natural immunity to the virus, making it harder to spread, or the U.S. could start vaccinating poultry against the flu, which the country has so far been reluctant to do.

Omelets aside, curbing the spread of avian flu is in our best interest, not just to help prevent $6 egg cartons, but also to avoid a much scarier possibility: the virus spilling over and infecting people. All viruses from the influenza-A family have an avian origin, noted Webby; a chilling example is the H1N1 strain behind the 1918 flu pandemic. Fortunately, although some people have been infected with H5N1, very few cases of human-to-human spread have been documented. But continued transmission, over a long enough period, could change that. The fact that the virus has recently jumped from birds to mammals, such as seals and bears, and spread among mink is troubling, because that means that it is evolving to infect species that are more closely related to us. “The risk of this particular virus [spreading among humans] as it is now is low, but the consequences are potentially high,” Webby said. “If there is a flu virus that I don’t want to catch, this one would be it.”

More than anything, the egg shortage is a reminder that the availability of food is not something we can take for granted going forward. Shortages of staple goods seem to be striking with more regularity not only due to pandemic-related broken supply chains and inflation, but also because of animal and plant disease. In 2019, swine fever decimated China’s pork supply; the ongoing lettuce shortage, which rapper Cardi B bemoaned earlier this month, is the result of both a plant virus and a soil disease. Last September, California citrus growers detected a virus known to reduce crop yields. By creating cozier conditions for some diseases, climate change is expected to raise risk of infection for both animals and plants. And as COVID has illustrated, any situation in which different species are forced into abnormally close quarters with one another is likely to encourage the spread of disease.

Getting used to intermittent shortages of staple foods such as eggs and lettuce will in all likelihood become a normal part of meal planning, barring some huge shift away from industrial farming and its propensity for fostering disease. These farms are a major reason certain foods are so inexpensive and widely available in the first place; if cheap eggs seemed too good to be true, it’s because they were. Besides, there are always alternatives: May I suggest cream-of-broccoli soup?