COVID was never as big of a deal as we were lead to believe.

• It was worse, actually, a lot of cases were systematically undercounted, as demonstrated by excess death numbers. You can read more about that here.
• In some cases because covid caused an earlier death by impacting an existing disease, and
• There is also less public health dialogue about the impacts of long covid.
• The most fascinating thing to me is that the take of "it wasn't a big deal", especially the "wasn't" aspect, is that if we'd taken the approach of its not a big deal with alpha and delta (which were much more devastating that omicron), we would have been much worse off (as demonstrated by those "waves" we used ot see in response to our protective measures turning on and off).

Here is a general article on inflated deaths that is interesting, too.

I think one of the saddest/interesting aspects of the virus is that when people aren't careful with it, it harms those people, their families, and people like them most. You can see evidence of this type of thing in the way covid seems to have a greater impact on people in pro-trump counties in the US.