One of the challenges of writing about the coronavirus pandemic these days is that the most important question to answer can’t be answered yet.

       Experts expect that — assuming nothing changes, which is not a fair assumption — the pandemic will split in two moving forward, with the unvaccinated still suffering the worst effects of infection and the vaccinated largely avoiding any infection or symptoms but, in the worst case, seeing something like a bad flu. We’ve seen something like this unfold in the United Kingdom, where the wide spread of the delta variant of the virus led to a surge in new cases but didn’t result in the same level of associated deaths that would have been expected a year ago.

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       If the current increase in new cases in the United States follows the same pattern, it’s a good indicator the pandemic has entered a new phase, one in which new case totals aren’t necessarily the best metric to gauge negative effects. If the pandemic becomes what former president Donald Trump always claimed it was, nothing worse than the seasonal flu, then the effort to combat it similarly shifts.

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       But, again, we don’t yet know if it has.

       The current surge in cases began June 21. It’s been dramatic, with new cases quickly climbing to a 7-day average of near 100,000 cases. With the increase in cases there’s also been an increase in hospitalizations, one that is so far not slowing down. Until about a week ago, there had not been a noticeable increase in covid-19-related deaths — but that, too, has changed. Over the past two weeks, the number of deaths from covid-19 is up 78 percent.

       This metric of the rate of change is useful. Since last summer, we’ve seen that the change in new cases leads the change in hospitalizations by about two weeks and the change in new deaths by about three weeks. That would mean we would expect the change in deaths now to be about where new cases were 20 days ago. But 20 days ago, the number of new cases each day was more than twice what it had been two weeks prior — meaning the number of new deaths is trailing slightly.

       Again, though, that’s different from the way things looked a week ago. Then, we were at the point indicated with the arrow. The rate of change of deaths seemed to be flat. That hospitalizations were keeping pace with new cases certainly suggested even then that deaths might follow. After all, if vaccinations were tamping down on the worst effects, we’d have expected hospitalizations to be relatively depressed as well.

       It is still the case that, while a number of states are seeing levels of cases that are at or near the peaks they’d seen during the pandemic, the level of deaths seen even in the hardest-hit states are well off prior peaks. It’s not clear that this will hold. Notice, below, that Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana are all seeing a lot of hospitalizations and deaths relative to their peaks. Those states have been at the epicenter of the recent surge.

       One of the other arguments made in support of the idea that this surge might avoid the worst effects of the pandemic is that broader vaccine distribution among older Americans has meant that those who are contracting the virus at this point are skewing younger. An analysis of 28 million anonymized records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that this is partly true. Over the past four months, about 69 percent of new infections have been among those under the age of 50. In the past four months of 2020, that figure was 59 percent.

       But that also means 3-in-10 infections over the past four months have been among the high-risk over-60 group. Polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 7 percent of those ages 65 and over say they will not get the vaccine — meaning that about 3.8 million people in the category of people most at-risk of death are choosing not to be protected with vaccines.

       Perhaps this worst-case scenario will be avoided. Perhaps, though, government officials’ repeated descriptions of this as being primarily a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” will translate into the pandemic also being one in which people are dying at the same rate that they did last winter.

       All we can do at this point is wait and see.