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THAT ’70S SHOW — “I don’t think the administration is on top of it at all,” the CEO of one of the U.S.’s largest companies, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern over angering the administration, tells Ben White, who’s back with a new piece on the thing that seems to come up wherever you are in the country: inflation.

Also, the rent is too damn high: New tonight, from Katy O’Donnell and Victoria Guida: “Surging gas and grocery prices are constant reminders of inflation, but another creeping trend spells more trouble for people’s wallets and Democrats’ political fate: rising rents.”

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at [email protected]. Or contact tonight’s author at [email protected], or on Twitter at @RenuRayasam.

WRITE YOUR OWN ENDING — I dream of the day I can burn all of my masks.

It will be a day when I don’t have to check, “wallet, keys and oh yeah mask,” before I leave the house. A day when I can put on big dangly earrings without struggling to pull the loops over my ears. A day when I finally know what my writing students at the University of Texas at El Paso actually look like. A day when I can see my kids’ faces in their class pictures.

To me, that will be the day that signals the end of the pandemic, the moment when the crisis has passed and Covid-19 no longer figures into our daily cost-benefit analysis. It will be the moment when I can start saying “post-pandemic.”

It’s also a day that seems ever elusive.

Nearly 60 percent of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated, but 46,000 people are being hospitalized and 1,200 people are still dying every single day, according to the New York Times. Even those who personally feel the pandemic is over — or was never that much of a threat — still have to contend with the minor inconveniences and major disruptions of Covid. They still have to wear masks in planes and other public spaces and quarantine after getting a positive test.

Back in February, I asked a group of Nightly experts how we would know if the pandemic was over. They gave me specific answers: case numbers, vaccination rates, positive test ratios. No one predicted a #CovidZero scenario, but it seemed like we would soon hit a threshold and declare victory. We thought, back then, that we would all be back in the office by now.

That was before the Delta variant, evidence of waning vaccine immunity and growing concerns over Covid in kids.

So I reached out to the same group of experts this week to re-ask my question about the pandemic’s end. Nine months later, they were far less sure about what it would look like and how we would get there.

“I don’t know what equilibrium will be,” said Jeffrey Shaman, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University, who correctly predicted a period of premature exuberance last time around. “I would prefer you would not quote me on a number.”

The critical numbers to watch, Shaman said, are hospitalizations and infection fatality ratios — the proportion of people who die after being infected. Right now the vaccinated are far better protected than the unvaccinated: a Texas study showed that unvaccinated people made up 85 percent of the state’s total Covid deaths from mid-January to October this year.

“Covid-19 is a different threat than it was before vaccines,” said Abraar Karan, an infectious disease doctor at Stanford University. But, he said, the biggest open question is whether the Covid vaccine’s efficacy will wane over time and whether a booster is the last shot in a three-shot series or an annual necessity. A variant that renders the vaccine less effective could emerge, too.

Overall, Karan said he’s looking to see daily deaths fall below 200 a day — a marker we hit briefly during the summer — and stay there.

Worthy goals, according to Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist with George Mason University and the University of Arizona, would be: 5 new cases per 100,000 people over seven days; transmission rates below 0.9; vaccination rates above 75 percent; and a percentage of hospital patients with Covid of between 1 and 10 percent.

In the U.S., only Puerto Rico is close to all those numbers, according to Covid Act Now.

Nearly two years after the first detected cases in China, we are still early in the trajectory of a novel virus, Popescu said. At some point in the future — after vaccination rates are high globally and after community transmission levels are low — the challenge will shift to monitoring and addressing small regional outbreaks. But not yet.

Declaring the end of the pandemic is more a question of values and politics than of science, Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, said when I reached him, repeating what he told me in February.

Maybe a better vaccine will come along or deaths will fall dramatically. Therapeutics to better treat Covid are already on the way. But ultimately we — individuals, parents, states, school boards, businesses — will have to keep deciding how much Covid we are willing to tolerate in exchange for living without masks and testing and quarantine requirements, Caplan said. It’s what we have done all along.

Before the pandemic, immunocompromised people were told to mask up during flu season, Caplan points out. Post-pandemic, whenever that is, even if Covid becomes less deadly and virus levels fall, some people may decide that a trip to the movie theater isn’t worth the risk or hassle of getting Covid, but a family visit is.

Shaman had another non-numerical post-pandemic marker in mind, one I think about a lot too:

“When you guys don’t have to write about it that often,” he said, “that will be the benchmark.”

— Biden and Xi set for Zoom summit: A virtual summit between President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping is tentatively scheduled for Monday evening, a U.S. official told POLITICO today. A second, non-administration source familiar with the summit’s planning confirmed the date. The two leaders telegraphed their intent Tuesday to establish a positive tone for the summit via letters of congratulations both leaders sent to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations to mark its 55th anniversary. Xi’s letter, read by China’s ambassador, Qin Gang, at Tuesday’s committee black-tie gala dinner, stated that “China stands ready to work with the United States to enhance exchanges and cooperation across the board ... so as to bring China-U.S. relations back to the right track of sound and steady development.”

— Rittenhouse murder case thrown into jeopardy by mistrial bid: The murder case against Kyle Rittenhouse was thrown into jeopardy today when his lawyers asked for a mistrial over what appeared to be out-of-bounds questions asked of Rittenhouse by the chief prosecutor. The judge did not immediately rule on the request. The startling turn came after Rittenhouse, in a high-stakes gamble, took the stand and testified that he was under attack when he shot three men, two fatally, during a night of turbulent protests against racial injustice in Kenosha in the summer of 2020.

— Nevada Democrat seeks to become nation’s first openly transgender statewide elected official: Democrat Kimi Cole announced today her bid to become Nevada’s lieutenant governor — and break barriers in the process. Cole, the chair of the Nevada Democratic Rural Caucus, would be the first openly transgender statewide elected official in the country if she won, according to her campaign.

— Cuomo to investigators: ‘I don’t have regrets’: Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo conceded to investigators that he made many of the comments that led to sexual harassment accusations against him, but he downplayed their significance and said some of them were taken out of context. “I don’t have regrets,” Cuomo told investigators, according to transcripts from the probe released today by state Attorney General Tish James. “Look, if you could always state everything over, I’m sure I would state things — if I could restate everything I’ve ever said to a woman or a man, I’d say it differently. But generally, no.” The 512-page transcript was from an interview conducted in July as part of James’ probe into the numerous allegations of sexual harassment against Cuomo.

— Study: Fox viewers more likely to believe Covid falsehoods: People who trust Fox News Channel and other media outlets that appeal to conservatives are more likely to believe falsehoods about Covid-19 and vaccines than those who primarily go elsewhere for news, a study has found. While the Kaiser Family Foundation study released this week found the clear ties between news outlets that people trusted and the amount of misinformation they believe, it took no stand on whether those attitudes specifically came from what they saw there.

ANOTHER CRISIS, THIS TIME IN EUROPE — European defense leaders are fretting that the surging migration crisis at the Belarus-Poland border could spark another crisis — violent conflict, Jacopo Barigazzi writes.

“The potential for escalation is extremely high,” Estonian Defense Minister Kalle Laanet said today at a press conference during the Annual Baltic Conference on Defense, a regular event that gathers the defense community in Estonia.

His comments were echoed at the same press conference by senior defense officials from Greece, Lithuania and the U.K., who all shared the fear of escalation. Currently, at least 2,000 migrants are camped in freezing temperatures at the Belarus border with Poland, unable to enter the country, but not allowed to turn back — part of a Belarusian scheme EU officials have termed a “hybrid attack” against the bloc, combining political and military elements.

Adding to the tensions, the crisis comes shortly after satellite photos confirmed reports Russia is once again massing troops and military equipment on its border with Ukraine. Estonian officials said it is easy to connect the dots between the two events. And on Tuesday, Poland directly accused Moscow of helping orchestrate the plot to lure migrants from Middle Eastern countries to Belarus before sending them to the EU’s borders.

When asked by POLITICO, Laanet did not rule out the possibility of a full-blown war at the border, although he was exceedingly cautious in his remarks. “Of course we can’t say that there is no risk,” he said. “But we don’t know yet how high this [risk] is at the moment. … We have to monitor very deeply every day the situation.”

SCAM PAC BRUSHBACK — For the last five years or more, Matt Tunstall has used the name and likeness of Donald Trump and other politicians to ostensibly raise money for a network of political action committees. But he’s been accused of pocketing most of the money himself and now, his so-called scam PAC operation finally caught up to him, Caitlin Oprysko writes.

In an indictment unsealed today, federal prosecutors charged Tunstall and Robert Reyes with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and to lie to the Federal Election Committee. They allege that of the roughly $3.5 million raised by the PACs they ran during the 2016 election, “only approximately $19 were distributed to any candidate’s authorized campaign committee or to any political cause, while a total of more than $1.5 million was used to benefit” the PAC operators themselves.

Prosecutors also charged Tunstall with multiple counts of wire fraud and money laundering. The indictment charges a third associate and cousin of Tunstall, Kyle Davies, with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and to lie to the FEC and multiple counts of wire fraud.

Tunstall, 34, has been linked to a number of political action committees — including as recently as this spring — using Trump’s name in order to raise money. Campaign finance disclosures showed that those PACs contributed little or none of that money to Trump’s campaign or causes. And Tunstall has reportedly used the returns to fund a lavish lifestyle for himself, or one portrayed as such online.