What she is much more comfortable with is stating, unequivocally, that we can ease the tough months ahead if we all adopt the simple precautions—masking, social distancing, hand-washing—that experts have advocated for again and again over the past year. We also must be willing to write off this holiday season—limiting Thanksgiving gatherings to just the people in our own households and similarly scaling back Christmas, in one final push to get the pandemic behind us.