https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

The severity has dropped more than the prevalence.

Hospitalizations suggest that in the US the peak in Jan 2024 was around 80% as big as Jan 2023. If that's accurate, then Jan 2024 had more cases per day than most of 2020 and a good chunk of 2021. That's a lot of extent. There had been 120 thousand cases in the entire world when pandemic was originally declared, and the US is currently doing a multiple of that each week.