September Is Here. Normal Isn't

Pickert and Rockeman explain that delta threatens to keep more US workers at home, jeopardizing the long-promised fall comeback. When President Joe Biden signed a $1.9 trillion US stimulus package in Mar, dissolving most of the emergency pandemic safety net come Sep seemed to make sense. Vaccinations were rising rapidly, and schools were preparing to resume in-person learning in the fall, removing two main hurdles keeping people-especially parents-out of the workforce. But the month that originally seemed like a logical time to ease fiscal support is here, and it's not proving to be the inflection point for normalcy that policymakers and business leaders had imagined. The delta variant of the coronavirus is ripping across a country with far lower vaccination rates than Congress had been modeling when it wrote the latest relief bill.