Good Lord. Philip Bump has the story: America transitioned out of its covid-19 mobilization the same way it transitioned in: awkwardly, unevenly and with mixed results. The Biden administration’s interest in formalizing the end of the official pandemic — under pressure from President Biden’s right — meant that systems that had been cobbled together to measure and address the problem were often just switched off, with varying downstream effects. Given that the tools we’d used to track the pandemic are now mostly broken or out-of-date, it’s a bit harder to know when and if the virus might again be surging. But in recent weeks, there’s been little question: wastewater measurements and other calculations made clear that infections were again rising. Hopefully, despite the shift to cooler weather in the Northeast, the recent plateau in cases means the trend is reversing. When KFF earlier this month asked Americans if they thought that cases were surging, however, about a third said they didn’t. That was a minority position, but the demographic divides on the question were revealing. Three-quarters of Democrats said they believed there was a new wave; most Republicans didn’t. Among those who had never been vaccinated against coronavirus, fully 6 in 10 didn’t believe there was a new wave of infections. That unvaccinated population, of course, is disproportionately made up of Republicans. In other words, even when just considering the state of the pandemic, partisan differences emerge in a way that overlaps with views of the vaccine. And not just past views; that is, whether…