I'm somewhat optimistic because the vaccines are probably good enough to bring death rates to an acceptable level, we have multiple vaccines, that take differen

I'm somewhat optimistic because the vaccines are probably good enough to bring death rates to an acceptable level, we have multiple vaccines, that take different approaches, and covid has hopefully already made all the easy wins for transmission, so it won't get that much more contagious. My fear is that all these countermeasures select for something actually scary, though there's no reason to think it will get significantly more deadly.