People want to have fun and/or make money. Vaccines were developed, manufactured, and distributed at warp speed. There is no political will for any more public health orders. Even California one of the strictest ended all restrictions in June.
California still has restrictions. Not enough imho, but they are here. There was a brief moment (before Delta) where vaccines stopped infection instead of only slowing it down. Now with Omicron, we're almost back where we started. 53k people in a convention (must be indoors if it's in NY) is a super spreader event.
And South Africa is still masked, sanitized, curfewed, and travel banned. Weird.