> Once Omicron subsides, Biden will take the credit

I'm even more cynical than you. We have to be "back to normal" (one way or another) by midterm elections next November, or the democrats will be wiped out.

Let's face it, Congressional Democrats are getting wiped out either way. They blew it this past year. I'm saying this as someone who has only voted Democrat or third party in elections my entire life.

They went too far towards "keep the elite status quo going but blame inaction on this one guy" and they're going to be punished for it, big time. Meanwhile Biden had plenty of power by himself to do so much more than he has done (his campaign promise of $10k student loan forgiveness, for one).

Most of them probably don't even care, because they can just sit back, blame the Republicans for not being able to do anything again, and raise money for the next two years. People like AOC and Bernie probably care, but they're not going to be able to turn the ship around.

That isn’t cynical. The party in power will always take the blame for anything that isn’t going right. And COVID not ending as a pandemic is definitely one of those big things not going right. It doesn’t even matter that every other country is having the same problem, Americans expect their governments to solve it or they will “vote the turkeys out.”

Cynical is “the Democrat hoax virus will disappear two weeks after the election.” If only Trump were right about that, but alas COVID wouldn’t disappear so easily. The cynics were optimists in that regard.

You're describing pretty much every country with more-or-less free elections.

What is true is that, whether people in the US look around their own country or look across the pond at Europe overall, it's increasingly difficult to lay everything on one political party and one politician in particular. Or indeed to argue that most policies/interventions (other than vaccinations that tend to prevent serious outcomes) make a huge difference at all.

The policies and interventions have been fairly uniform in developed countries, with fairly uniform results. The only conclusion we can make is that barring very authoritarian zero COVID polices (like in China) or being a literal and figurative island (New Zealand), we can’t stop the pandemic with just vaccines and masking.

"Fairly uniform" is covering a lot of ground. On the other hand, there has been a ton of ink spilled and screaming on Twitter threads over Sweden or Florida versus other countries and states. And very obviously different outcomes in the US/Europe vs. many other areas of the world that aren't China or New Zealand.

But we probably mostly agree. A lot of differences in policies and behaviors (that many have and do feel very strongly about) are probably in the noise relative to other random factors.

If the developed countries just said "Let it go", the developed world would be a much different spot than we are today. Definitely we would have been at a greater risk of being much worse. I am not unsatisfied with how we've handled it.

I don't really disagree. Even if a lot of it ended up being mostly about pushing back the number of cases until a lot of people got vaccinated. Certainly Australia at the moment sure suggests that you can delay things but it's pretty difficult to delay cases of all degrees of severity indefinitely.

We can't stop the pandemic just with masking, vaccines, and the level of quarantining that people are willing to put up with.