This past year might have felt breezy if you're in your sixties, or bearable if you're in your thirties - but if you're in your teens or younger you've been deprived of a lot of social development time and there will be long term damage from this.

Additionally - I don't know if it really is an irrelevant factor for the future. This is a flu variant that could continue to mutate and cause havoc if governments act irresponsibly or if a particularly large segment of the population continues to resist vaccination and mask wearing while being egged on by idiots on TV. Lastly, global habitat destruction increases the chances we discover fun new world ending diseases, hopefully we won't see another one for decades, but it's unlikely that we'll be spared another global pandemic for the next 100 years.