We have a widely deployed vaccine.

COVID will live with us forever now, a pandemic has a few characteristics which make it so, one of which is capacity to overwhelm healthcare.

As soon as covid couldn’t overwhelm our healthcare systems it was over.

Now people will die every year with it, just like the flu.

Sad reality, but reality nonetheless, the fact we couldn’t handle a lock-down cemented that we would be living with it for the rest of human existence.

We still haven't really grappled with the aftereffects of long COVID. What we've done instead is say it's over because the acute phase is done with, and buried the reports of longer term issues. In other words, the health care system now simply returns wrong answers to triage its own capacity.

But that doesn't make it no longer a pandemic. We know quite well that we can normalize our way into wrong answers as a society. It'll only become clear where we stand after another year or two - either more and more people become disabled after their "mild" case, or it gradually trails off.

The vaccine only lasts six months. I am not sure how "widely deployed" it is anymore.

Children today, and their children, will gain immunity over an entire lifetime through repeated exposure.

So it is with all other coronaviruses, which have been around for millions of years and don't routinely kill older/vulnerable people.

T cell immunity lasts longer than that. The antibody counts are kind of like a “watched pot never boils” thing - we’ve just never bothered to look before so now everyone is stressing about it.