It’s a silent COVID spring Fewer people at my grocery stores are wearing masks of any kind these days. The widely debated Cochrane review on masks made its brief ripple and faded. Except for the Chinese lab theory, the right largely has moved on to another set of culture war rants. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene would rather blather about fentanyl. And the 2020 election? Greene should be on a license plate. Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke has moved on to … you know. But COVID has not moved on, writes Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic. It has just gotten quieter. It’s still adapting: Three years later, the coronavirus is still silently spreading—but the fear of its covertness again seems gone. Enthusiasm for masking and testing has plummeted; isolation recommendations have been pared down, and may soon entirely disappear. “We’re just not communicating about asymptomatic transmission anymore,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and infection-prevention expert at George Mason University. “People think, What’s the point? I feel fine.” Although the concern over asymptomatic spread has dissipated, the threat itself has not. And even as our worries over the virus continue to shrink and be shunted aside, the virus—and the way it moves between us—is continuing to change. Which means that our best ideas for stopping its spread aren’t just getting forgotten; they’re going obsolete. Meagan Fitzpatrick, an infectious-disease transmission modeler at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine, tells Wu that symptomless spread likely accounted for 50 percent of transmission. But after rounds…