While your point is spot on, it probably won‘t matter in the long run. With the infection rate of Omicron, we as a society were faced between even more ridiculously restrictive measures to contain it after the first economy destroying measures — or just taking the jump into the unknown unknown of what will happen if we let everyone get infected and move into the endemic state.
With probably only the exception of China, most countries have decided that they will take the latter path, at various degrees of throttling.
That's assuming we're containing it at all. This all seems very hubristic to me, but I just wanted to point out the assumption. It's not because we do things that burden us to a degree that the virus' spread is also burdened to the same degree. I feel that this is an unconscious assumption that's made in this discussion.
We’re not, people are pretending that we are or still have the opportunity.
Most of the US is at or past the omicron peak, it stopped growing because it’s running out of people to infect. The more cautious people will make up a long fat tail, but it really seems doubtful that anything can be done.
We’ve had 72 million detected cases in the US, if you assume a certain number didn’t test and a big number never knew they had it at all… we are really running out of people to “save” from covid infections. During the national peak, there were something like a million infections a day.
With probably only the exception of China, most countries have decided that they will take the latter path, at various degrees of throttling.