… Eh? No, that seems highly unlikely. Decent therapeutic drugs will be available from next year (in quantity; homeopathic quantities are already available but not to the point where they’re particularly useful). Increasingly few people are totally naive to the virus. Over the next period of time there’ll be precautions to keep the hospitals operating and the death rate down, but that will tend to get easier and easier.

If you look at hospitalisation and death figures from heavily vaccinated countries, each wave has generally been less severe even as variants get nastier and restrictions are eased (you’re not seeing March 2020 restrictions pretty much anywhere today). It remains early for omicron, but initial signs show the same pattern.

I do think that places with this kind of politico-cultural objection to vaccines (parts of the US and Eastern Europe, for instance) may struggle.