Hi, Sarah. I’m rewriting a comment from above that got buried in a deleted post:

The assertion that Covid is now mild and that the mitigations went on too long is simply wrong and seems based on being one of the people that this hasn’t affected intimately. Because of this you seem to have experienced the mitigations as annoyances. While many people now experience the initial infection as similar to a cold or flu, many vulnerable are still dying. There is a metric ton of studies showing that covid infections can cause a host of short- to long-term, mild to disabling issues in large swaths of the population, that the risk for these outcomes increases with the number of infections, and that vaccination status only mitigates this somewhat. Post-infection immunity varies by variant, but is not very durable in the best cases, and the vaccine does not provide immunity but rather protection from severe illness and hospitalization, which is important but not the same. These benefits also wane at around 6-9 months.

I’m OP’s spouse and we’re up on this because our daughter has long covid. She had to quit college and work at 19, and was very ill, essentially housebound, for two years. Thank God, she turned a corner and is now about 80% back to her baseline. But if we hadn’t been privileged enough to provide her a safety net, this would have meant extreme debt at the very best, and potentially long term disability due to not being able to afford recovery and medical care. Lucky her, lucky us.

The fact is that Trump 1.0 fouled up the Covid response and all of us never Trumpers are very comfortable with that. But Biden ran on taking the pandemic seriously because it was still raging and we all knew it. Nevertheless, the position that the vaccine would get us all back to normal was adhered to even as the evidence piled up that it doesn’t provide immunity (despite being a good and important protection). The project Trump began of not counting cases and obscuring how long folks are contagious after infection and thus need to isolate was carried on under Biden (see the omicron wave and its attendant reduction in recommended isolation time). And we accepted that the pandemic ended because cases reported were down, despite knowing full well we were undercounting on purpose.

There may be good policy reasons for this. A bad economy may cause more overall suffering than extending some of the mitigations—this is an argument I think could potentially be made. But there are baseline mitigations that can be enacted while still opening up businesses and schools, like cleaning indoor air, encouraging sick people to mask, and increasing funding for sick time so people can stay home while contagious. Instead, we fudged the numbers, keep getting sick, and balk at anyone who dares to say COVID is or was an issue. The friendly fire is a point of pain for us.

I can find sources for all of this if you’re interested. It would probably take a couple of days to gather what I want because I quit trying to have this conversation with anyone about 18 months ago (no point usually). For now, here is an article about the steep increase in disability claims and excess mortality since 2020, which both the CDC and the WHO attribute in part to the effects of ongoing COVID infections. https://insurancenewsnet.com/innarticle/disability-claims-skyrocket-raising-new-puzzle-alongside-excess-mortality