Financial panics are nothing new. But the strange little panic we’re enduring—one that started last week with a massive bank run causing the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and that continued this morning with big sell-offs in the stocks of other regional banks—is arguably the first one in which social media, and particularly Twitter, has been a major player. And if the past few days are any indication, that does not bode well for the next major financial crisis.

Twitter has featured a useful flow of facts and analysis from informed observers and participants, on subjects including SVB’s balance sheet, the failures of bank regulation, and the pros and cons of bailing out depositors. But users have also been subjected to a flood of dubious rumors and hysterical predictions of new bank runs. Federal regulators worked assiduously over the weekend to come up with a plan that would forestall contagion and reassure depositors that their money was safe. But on Twitter, chaos loomed.

[Annie Lowrey: Silicon Valley Bank’s failure is now everyone’s problem]

The most notorious tweets of the past few days came from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, investors, and company executives, who were desperate for the government to guarantee that no SVB depositor would lose any money (even though most of SVB’s deposits were not FDIC-insured). Their rhetorical strategy of choice was to insist that unless SVB’s depositors were made immediately whole, the entire tech industry and every non-megabank in America would be at risk.

Specifically, they said we were facing a “Startup Extinction Event” that would set “innovation” back by 10 years or more. If the Federal Reserve and the FDIC made the wrong decision about SVB’s depositors, that could lead to “a bank run trillions of dollars in size.”

Jason Calacanis, an investor who spent much of the weekend tweeting red-alert messages in all caps, captured the general mood when he wrote, “YOU SHOULD BE ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED RIGHT NOW.”

Now, the Silicon Valley bros insisting that everything was going to hell may well have believed what they were tweeting (even if it seemed like a somewhat hyperbolic reaction to the failure of a middling bank). But they were also, as the saying goes, talking their book. Almost all of them had a clear financial interest in seeing SVB depositors — which included companies they were invested—in made whole by the government.

More to the point, by tweeting in such over-the-top language about the inevitability—not the possibility, but the inevitability—of massive bank runs across the country, they were, of course, making such bank runs more likely. Shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater is not necessarily wrong if the theater is on fire. But encouraging panic is never the best strategy.

Predictions can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Everyone who thinks that everyone else is going to pull their money out of the bank is going to try to get in the door first. These tweets also typically drew no distinction between wealthy depositors—who may well have uninsured deposits—and the majority of Americans, whose deposits are insured no matter which bank they have them in. That, too, contributed to the atmosphere of panic.

Still, the predictions of imminent doom weren’t the worst that social media had to offer this weekend. We also got a wild proliferation of rumors about the health not just of the banking system, but of specific banks. Unsurprisingly, many of the Twitter bios of the people spreading these kinds of rumors included the words Bitcoin or crypto.

[Read: Nancy Pelosi: ‘Follow the money’]

One high-profile, and especially egregious, example of this phenomenon came from Mike Alfred, who identifies himself as an “engaged value investor” and has almost 130,000 followers. Over the course of the day on Saturday, he tweeted out (and then deleted) a series of very specific claims about what was supposedly happening to First Republic Bank, headquartered in California, whose stock went through a massive sell off on Friday on concerns that it might go under as a result of contagion from SVB’s collapse. His proof for these claims, he tweeted, was “corroborating evidence from several good sources.” Well, okay then.

You might reasonably say that although none of this is ideal, the obvious answer is for people to be skeptical of what they read, particularly when it comes from sources they’re unsure of, and not to make decisions or leap to conclusions on the basis of random tweets. And that’s obviously correct in principle. But as we’ve seen with the persistence of false claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen, and the continued ubiquity of false claims about the supposed deadliness of the COVID vaccines, social media is built, in some respects, to make it hard for people to be skeptical and patient. It’s a medium that is designed to encourage herding and trend-following—which, after all, are what makes things go viral—not independent thought.

This is especially true when it comes to something like a financial panic, the nature of which makes people more likely to act on fear and impulse. In that environment, false or just overheated claims, even if they seem improbable, can nonetheless have a powerful effect. They cast a kind of shadow that helps instill uncertainty and doubt. And that’s often enough to lead to bad outcomes, given that during panics, many of us act first and think later. Social media is now going to profoundly shape any financial crisis we go through. It doesn’t feel like we’re ready for it.

To be a newborn in the year 2023—and, almost certainly, every year that follows—means emerging into a world where the coronavirus is ubiquitous. Babies might not meet the virus in the first week or month of life, but soon enough, SARS-CoV-2 will find them. “For anyone born into this world, it’s not going to take a lot of time for them to become infected,” maybe a year, maybe two, says Katia Koelle, a virologist and infectious-disease modeler at Emory University. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, this virus will be one of the very first serious pathogens that today’s infants—and all future infants—meet.

Three years into the coronavirus pandemic, these babies are on the leading edge of a generational turnover that will define the rest of our relationship with SARS-CoV-2. They and their slightly older peers are slated to be the first humans who may still be alive when COVID-19 truly hits a new turning point: when almost everyone on Earth has acquired a degree of immunity to the virus as a very young child.

[Read: Is COVID a common cold yet?]

That future crossroads might not sound all that different from where the world is currently. With vaccines now common in most countries and the virus so transmissible, a significant majority of people have some degree of immunity. And in recent months, the world has begun to witness the consequences of that shift. The flux of COVID cases and hospitalizations in most countries seems to be stabilizing into a seasonal-ish sine wave; disease has gotten, on average, less severe, and long COVID seems to be somewhat less likely among those who have recently gotten shots. Even the virus’s evolution seems to be plodding, making minor tweaks to its genetic code, rather than major changes that require another Greek-letter name.

But today’s status quo may be more of a layover than a final destination in our journey toward COVID’s final form. Against SARS-CoV-2, most little kids have fared reasonably well. And as more babies have been born into a SARS-CoV-2-ridden world, the average age of first exposure to this coronavirus has been steadily dropping—a trend that could continue to massage COVID-19 into a milder disease. Eventually, the expectation is that the illness will reach a stable nadir, at which point it may truly be “another common cold,” says Rustom Antia, an infectious-disease modeler at Emory.

The full outcome of this living experiment, though, won’t be clear for decades—well after the billions of people who encountered the coronavirus for the first time in adulthood are long gone. The experiences that today’s youngest children have with the virus are only just beginning to shape what it will mean to have COVID throughout a lifetime, when we all coexist with it from birth to death as a matter of course.

At the beginning of SARS-CoV-2’s global tear, the coronavirus was eager to infect all of us, and we had no immunity to rebuff its attempts. But vulnerability wasn’t just about immune defenses: Age, too, has turned out to be key to resilience. Much of the horror of the disease could be traced to having not only a large population that lacked protection against the virus—but a large adult population that lacked protection against the virus. Had the entire world been made up of grade-schoolers when the pandemic arrived, “I don’t think it would have been nearly as severe,” says Juliet Pulliam, an infectious-disease modeler at Stellenbosch University, in South Africa.

Across several viral diseases—polio, chicken pox, mumps, SARS, measles, and more—getting sick as an adult is notably more dangerous than as a kid, a trend that’s typically exacerbated when people don’t have any vaccinations or infections to those pathogens in their rearview. The manageable infections that strike toddlers and grade-schoolers may turn serious when they first manifest at older ages, landing people in the hospital with pneumonia, brain swelling, even blindness, and eventually killing some. When scientists plot mortality data by age, many curves bend into “a pretty striking J shape,” says Dylan Morris, an infectious-disease modeler at UCLA.

The reason for that age differential isn’t always clear. Some of kids’ resilience probably comes from having a young, spry body, far less likely to be burdened with chronic medical conditions that raise severe disease risk. But the quick-wittedness of the young immune system is also likely playing a role. Several studies have found that children are much better at marshaling hordes of interferon—an immune molecule that armors cells against viruses—and may harbor larger, more efficient cavalries of infected-cell-annihilating T cells. That performance peaks sometime around grade school or middle school, says Janet Chou, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital. After that, our molecular defenses begin a rapid tumble, growing progressively creakier, clumsier, sluggish, and likelier to launch misguided attacks against the tissues that house them. By the time we’re deep into adulthood, our immune systems are no longer sprightly, or terribly well calibrated. When we get sick, our bodies end up rife with inflammation. And our immune cells, weary and depleted, are far less unable to fight off the pathogens they once so easily trounced.

Whatever the explanations, children are far less likely to experience serious symptoms, or to end up in the hospital or the ICU after being infected with SARS-CoV-2. Long COVID, too, seems to be less prevalent in younger cohorts, says Alexandra Yonts, a pediatrician at Children’s National Hospital. And although some children still develop MIS-C, a rare and dangerous inflammatory condition that can appear weeks after they catch the virus, the condition “seems to have dissipated” as the pandemic has worn on, says Betsy Herold, the chief of pediatric infectious disease at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, in the Bronx.

Should those patterns hold, and as the age of first exposure continues to fall, COVID is likely to become less intense. The relative mildness of childhood encounters with the virus could mean that almost everyone’s first infection—which tends, on average, to be more severe than the ones that immediately follow—could rank low in intensity, setting a sort of ceiling for subsequent bouts. That might make concentrating first encounters “in the younger age group actually a good thing,” says Ruian Ke, an infectious-disease modeler at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

COVID will likely remain capable of killing, hospitalizing, and chronically debilitating a subset of adults and kids alike. But the hope, experts told me, is that the proportion of individuals who face the worst outcomes will continue to drop. That may be what happened in the aftermath of the 1918 flu pandemic, Antia, of Emory, told me: That strain of the virus stuck around, but never caused the same devastation again. Some researchers suspect that something similar may have even played out with another human coronavirus, OC43: After sparking a devastating pandemic in the 19th century, it’s possible that the virus no longer managed to wreak much more havoc than a common cold in a population that had almost universally encountered it early in life.

Such a fate for COVID, though, isn’t a guarantee. The virus’s propensity to linger in the body’s nooks and crannies, sometimes causing symptoms that last many months or years, could make it an outlier among its coronaviral kin, says Melody Zeng, an immunologist at Cornell University. And even if the disease is likely to get better than what it is now, that is not a very high bar to clear.

Some small subset of the population will always be naive to the virus—and it’s not exactly a comfort that in the future, that cohort will almost exclusively be composed of our kids. Pediatric immune systems are robust, UCLA’s Morris told me. But “robust is not the same as infallible.” Since the start of the pandemic, more than 2,000 Americans under the age of 18 have died from COVID—a small fraction of total deaths, but enough to make the disease a leading cause of death for children in the U.S. MIS-C and long COVID may not be common, but their consequences are no less devastating for the children who experience them. Some risks are especially concentrated among our youngest kids, under the age 5, whose immune defenses are still revving up, making them more vulnerable than their slightly older peers. There’s especially little to safeguard newborns just under six months, who aren’t yet eligible for most vaccines—including COVID shots—and who are rapidly losing the antibody-based protection passed down from their mothers while they were in the womb.

A younger average age of first infection will also probably increase the total number of exposures people have to SARS-CoV-2 in a typical lifetime—each instance carrying some risk of severe or chronic disease. Ke worries the cumulative toll that this repetition could exact: Studies have shown that each subsequent tussle with the virus has the potential to further erode the functioning or structural integrity of organs throughout the body, raising the chances of chronic damage. There’s no telling how many encounters might push an individual past a healthy tipping point.

Racking up exposures also won’t always bode well for the later chapters of these children’s lives. Decades from now, nearly everyone will have banked plenty of encounters with SARS-CoV-2 by the time they reach advanced age, Chou, from Boston Children’s Hospital, told me. But the virus will also continue to change its appearance, and occasionally escape the immunity that some people built up as kids. Even absent those evasions, as their immune systems wither, many older people may not be able to leverage past experiences with the disease to much benefit. The American experience with influenza is telling. Despite a lifetime of infections and available vaccines, tens of thousands of people typically die annually of the disease in the United States alone, says Ofer Levy, the director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. So even with the expected COVID softening, “I don’t think we’re going to reach a point where it’s, Oh well, tra-la-la,” Levy told me. And the protection that immunity offers can have caveats: Decades of research with influenza suggest that immune systems can get a bit hung up on the first versions of a virus that they see, biasing them against mounting strong attacks against other strains; SARS-CoV-2 now seems to be following that pattern. Depending on the coronavirus variants that kids encounter first, their responses and vulnerability to future bouts of illness may vary, says Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

[Read: Are our immune systems stuck in 2020?]

Early vaccinations—that ideally target multiple versions of SARS-CoV-2—could make a big difference in reducing just about every bad outcome the virus threatens. Severe disease, long COVID, and transmission to other children and vulnerable adults all would likely be “reduced, prevented, and avoided,” Chou told me. But that’s only if very young kids are taking those shots, which, right now, isn’t at all the case. Nor are they necessarily getting protection passed down during gestation or early life from their mothers, because many adults are not up to date on COVID shots.

Some of these issues could, in theory, end up moot. A hundred or so years from now, COVID could simply be another common cold, indistinguishable in practice from any other. But Morris points out that this reality, too, wouldn’t fully spare us. “When we bother to look at the burden of the other human coronaviruses, the ones who have been with us for ages? In the elderly, it’s real,” he told me. One study found that a nursing-home outbreak of OC43—the purported former pandemic coronavirus—carried an 8 percent fatality rate; another, caused by NL63, killed three out of the 20 people who caught it in a long-term-care facility in 2017. These and other “mild” respiratory viruses also continue to pose a threat to people of any age who are immunocompromised.

SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t need to follow in those footsteps. It’s the only human coronavirus against which we have vaccines—which makes the true best-case scenario one in which it ends up even milder than a common cold, because we proactively protect against it. Disease would not need to be as inevitable; the vaccine, rather than the virus, could be the first bit of intel on the disease that kids receive. Tomorrow’s children probably won’t live in a COVID-free world. But they could at least be spared many of the burdens we’re carrying now.

There was a moment in the middle of tonight’s Oscar ceremony when I started getting concerned text messages from friends. Their line of inquiry was the same: Was All Quiet on the Western Front about to pull a big upset for Best Picture? The German World War I film, distributed by Netflix, had racked up a slew of technical wins, and a ceremony that had begun with a burst of joyous energy seemed headed in a more fusty, old-fashioned direction. Fear not, I assured every anxious pal: Everything Everywhere All at Once would be winning big.

Indeed, a riotous, baroque sci-fi action film stuffed with martial arts, crude humor, and ruminations on the multiverse dominated the 95th Academy Awards, capturing seven trophies—the most for a Best Picture winner since Slumdog Millionaire in 2009. Everything Everywhere All at Once secured the top prize, capping a wild award season for a film that came out almost a year ago and defied most of the usual formulas for an Oscar campaign. But the movie had built steam off the back of its heartfelt storytelling and box-office success at a time when cinemas were still struggling to rebound from COVID closures. It also made for milestone moments, most notably Michelle Yeoh’s win as Best Actress in a Leading Role, the first Asian performer to win in that category and only the second woman of color.

The first, Halle Berry, handed Yeoh the trophy in a satisfying TV moment that the Oscar producers had likely hoped for when they arranged for Berry to replace Will Smith as a presenter (the prior year’s acting winners traditionally present those categories, but Smith is banned from attending the Oscars for 10 years). In general, the show went smoothly, avoiding the surrealism of 2021’s COVID-impacted, small-scale ceremony, and the dizzying chaos of 2022’s, which was overshadowed by Smith slapping Chris Rock onstage. This year, producers Glenn Weiss and Ricky Kirshner swerved toward traditionalism, bringing back a single host and, unlike last time, airing every award live.

The ensuing ceremony was long, but not unusually so, and the pageantry familiar. Audiences witnessed many hosannas for the power of cinema and the thrill of the collective viewing experience. Jimmy Kimmel, in his third go-round as host, was his reliable self, keeping the patter light with just a couple of acidic jabs; more importantly, he lent a sense of structure that the past few years sorely lacked. Though Kimmel’s monologue lamented the absence of Tom Cruise (his film Top Gun: Maverick was a Best Picture nominee, but he’s reportedly busy filming), Everything Everywhere quickly emerged as the story of the night—no surprise given how it swept the precursor film awards.

The evening started off with two major wins for the movie: The endlessly gleeful and open-hearted Ke Huy Quan, a former child star who had mostly retired from acting in the early ’90s due to lack of opportunity, won Best Supporting Actor and gave a joyous speech. His co-star Jamie Lee Curtis, industry royalty who had only received her first nomination this year, followed by winning Best Supporting Actress.

[Read: A tale of two Oscar wins]

But then the ceremony bounced between technical awards, song performances, and montages (including a particularly egregious bit of spon-con for Disney’s upcoming Little Mermaid remake), and the energy began to dwindle. All Quiet on the Western Front won four awards, mostly in categories that Everything Everywhere wasn’t competing in, conveying the impression of momentum for a bleak work with a familiar title (another All Quiet won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1931). But just as my interest was flagging, things picked back up, partly thanks to song performances from Lady Gaga (singing “Hold My Hand” from Top Gun) and Kaala Bhairava and Rahul Sipligunj (performing RRR’s “Naatu Naatu”).

RRR won for Best Song, the first Indian film to do so, and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking mildly surprised All Quiet in the Adapted Screenplay category. Then it was a buzzy rush to the end, with Everything Everywhere winning for Directing (going to Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan), Lead Actress, and Picture, after also picking up the Original Screenplay award. The Whale was the only other multiple winner of the night, collecting a makeup and hairstyling award along with a Lead Actor trophy for Brendan Fraser, who seemed deeply overwhelmed by the moment. His was another comeback story following years in the Hollywood wilderness, and the crowd’s enthusiasm was palpable.

The strangeness of Everything Everywhere’s march to victory has been much-remarked upon already. Its March 2022 premiere makes it the earliest-in-the-year release to win Best Picture since The Silence of the Lambs in 1992, bucking the idea that a movie has to come out in the fall or later to get Oscar attention. It is a dense and challenging bit of genre storytelling for an awards body that has long been resistant to handing major trophies to such works. And it’s a breakthrough for Asian and Asian American performers, who have been under-recognized throughout Oscar history. But the Academy Awards reflect how the industry changes, even if the speed with which it happens can feel painfully slow, and the sight of Yeoh, Quan, and the Daniels collecting their trophies was a clear sign of a thunderous, triumphant shift.