There probably should be increased vigilence: Testing, immunisation, masking protocols. I have not heard it has moved from aerosol to fomites, so I am unsure handwashing needs to come back at scale for every single touch, but the drop in gastro suggests improved handwashing protocols overall were a net win.<p>Masking over anything else? Or testing over anything else? I like that there are combined flu(a+b)/covid tests now. I think that helps.<p>Nobody talks about what an annual Covid shot might look like, if we can now combine it with flu jabs, I'd be happy with a booster model of annual.<p>Nobody talks about immunisation rates in Africa and the developing world, or their death rates.<p>The intensive care rates, and death rates fly under the radar in Australia. We've stopped caring. There has been an uptick in the sustained rate of mortality all causes, I don't think stay-at-home/WFH has actually helped reduce deathrate overall because sedentary lifestyle probably accounts for some of the increased mortality.<p>It may take another 5-10 years for surplus mortality demographics to nail down what really happened. The post-Mao population dynamics of China took decades to get into a good shape, you simply can't hide the size of the cohort going to school and university when the due dates roll around. Some estimates (Jung Chang, "wild swans") were over the top. The government definitely minimised them. I will be very interested in the US, and Russian effective back-calculations because I think surplus deaths will turn out to be far larger than some people want to admit. It may affect the 2024 US elections by cohorts voting age and intentions.
From what I can tell covid will just become less powerful and more common, and be with us forever - think of influenza. We’ll get a winter shot to protect against it.<p>There is a pretty high likelihood I think though that we will see a new bug like covid soon. In the past 20 years globally we avoided MERS, SARS, bird flu, swine flu…. Something new is bound to hit at some point.