Australia

The pandemic is not over by a long shot. Current Covid levels in the US are the second highest they've ever been. They have almost 2000 deaths each week. We don't know nearly enough about the long term impacts of Covid on both individuals and society. There are mounting indications that Covid, especially when contracted repeatedly, really does a number on someone's immune system, the effects of which will manifest only much later in their lives. A lot of people have had long-term or permanent health impacts, some are functionally disabled.

But the pandemic, in people's minds, was over the moment the first politicians declared that we needed to 'return to normal'. We couldn't 'stay locked down forever'. We couldn't 'live in caves', and similar hyperbolic bullshit. Any further efforts at keeping Covid at bay were doomed once NSW famously lost control of their Delta outbreak and shifted rhetoric from 'we can contain this' to 'we have to learn to live with it' literally within hours. They forced other state governments' hands, and now this shit is endemic, happily spreading and mutating, and nobody gives a toss because every effort has been made to keep it out of the public consciousness.

I fear that we will only know in ten or twenty years what the true price is that we as humanity have to pay for treating this pandemic so lackadaisically. And to think this all could have prevented with smart policies, by governments who put people before the economy, and who weren't scared of making difficult decisions.