Perhaps then we should stop ignoring the potential effects of the ongoing airborne pandemic. But no, keep f*king around with COVID, and we keep finding out.
The pandemic was a unique situation because the entire world population was immuno-naive to covid. This is no longer the case; we all get exposed dozens of times per year and keep our natural immunity up.
It’s cost/benefit and leaders took the ‘keep the graph going up and to the right next quarter’ approach to the long term risks.
Containment is of course possible, it would just take technology improvements for diagnostic tests and education and investment in air quality.
The calculation is that saving the years of ill health aren’t worth disrupting the status quo
Edit: What’s the difference between sweeping over and always present? Whether we test and report it in the news or not?
And the "chart goes" up is such a strawman, I'm sure there's no real life downside or long term risk to just shut down everything for (2) more weeks... but whatever. That's such a western mentality, that only comes with the privilege of not living in an economically ruined part of the world.
There's a reason why doomers and "zero COVID" proponents are usually in the vast majority white, privileged, urban residents. I'm sure some vague, very broad "long term risks" that we still haven't seen concretely outside of a tiny minority (even if hundreds of millions were infected) are more important than the actual, proven, repeated risks of "charts going down".
In a way there's an odd parallel with antivaxxers who love to claim that in just a little bit more we will see the long term risks that came with the vaccine lol
Furthermore, Covid has animal hosts. Even if the would could cooperate on completely stamping it out it would soon jump back from some animal. We simply have to live with it, take what precautions you want in your personal life but there's no point in society at large doing so.
(I do, however, think that medical facilities should be mask-required. But I think they should have been pre-pandemic, also.)
In my opinion, there's no significant levers left to push to affect infection rates much.
Of course, we should be doing everything reasonable we can to tamp down COVID (and the flu). But short of permanent quarantine or forcing anti-vaxxers to get vaccinated, I'm not sure what there's left to do.
(It would be nice if we could socially normalize and encourage wearing a mask when one feels slightly sick, too).