I'd expected something similar to the John Snow pump handle story -- that once we learned that the virus spreads via air, we would invest in clean indoor air, a

I'd expected something similar to the John Snow pump handle story -- that once we learned that the virus spreads via air, we would invest in clean indoor air, and innovate ways to make it safer to share spaces with large numbers of people over extended time. The acute phase death rate may have dropped off (and the data collection has most definitely dropped off, stopped entirely, or became obfuscated, so it's hard to know for sure), but we know for a fact that about 15% of those who get sick, get a long-term sickness that ranges from seriously inconvenient to severely debilitating. We know this from collected data [1], not some statistical models. My inner cynic concludes that in for-profit healthcare systems, having a growing proportion of the population be chronically ill is actually the optimal scenario: you can dole out treatments and medicines at high prices, and as long as your patients don't die or get better, it's a very profitable proposition. I'm not saying we're doing this consciously like some comic-book villain, but the incentives are aligned exactly so. 1: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2023001/article/00015-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2023001/article...