At this point, does anyone believe we’ll get back to normalcy? What’s the path?
Most people have accepted COVID is here permanently. We're at ~50% vaccination and most vaccinated people I know says they won't get a booster because "it was supposed to make things go back to normal the first time."
Apathy is set in hard, and control of the message is outside the hands of the government and media here. Delta scared people a bunch, but after about a month, most people reverted back to not caring. I don't know anyone who is talking about Omicron, so I think every additional event just numbs more people.
Given that we've learned a lot, tactics and strategies have evolved, and therapeutics are getting better, death rate should continue to go down.
That's why many places in the US feel somewhat back to normal.
These countries need to lead the way to accepting we've waited for vaccines & prophylactics so that we have tools to use to combat this but there is now a heightened risk that we have to live with and make reasonable mitigations against.
Vaccines don't really stop the spread of the virus, neither do they stop you from getting infected, they just reduce the symptoms and the odds of death. Which is still great, but it's not stopping the virus.
We need next level meds, real vaccines.
Technically correct, they don't stop the spread, but they significantly reduce it.
It's kinda logical, isn't it? The virus must win over your antibodies to replicate. Currently breakthrough infections happen 1-2% of the time in the vaccinated, so even if there are 10x as many asymptomatic, unreported cases, the protective effect is still huge. This is really important to keep R < 1, which effectively means "stopping the virus". Eventually.
In addition, the 90% reduced chance of hospitalisation is of great help to the healthcare system.
Besides, restrictions have an exponential effect (by reducing the R value) whilst mitigations only have a linear effect. That makes it hard to replace one with the other. Instead I think earlier, less stringent, restrictions to start damping the wave early, combined with as much mitigation as possible are probably the right solution.
Every wave, its a new game of 'flatten the curve'. And really that is what we need.
If you look at the broad scale of human history, though, there have been hundreds of epidemics, and we got past them.
I suspect there's an end to be had via broad-based immunity to the most transmissive mutations evolution's random walk can come up with before it hits a local maxima.
Beyond that, a lockdown is not the only non-pharmaceutical intervention that's available to us. It's just that many governments have failed to use other tools at the right time and in a way that's actually effective, often only implementing them right before the peak of a wave when it's way too late.
Where I live, in Alberta, we had a really bad 4th wave in September/October. Prior to that we were at ~75% vaccination rate in those over 18. The wave almost killed our healthcare system and it was primarily unvaccinated individuals using the beds. Had we been at 100% vaccination rate, we most definitely wouldn't have been in the same position.