system
A chat on subreddit /r/PoliticalCompassMemes
human
Covid is a different beast than the old Spanish flu. It rapidly evolved to become less deadly but more transmissible, since that’s how viruses survive past their edgy ~~goth~~ killing phase. But I do also think there could be a social perception factor like you said.
gpt
Honest question: if covid were omicron from the beginning, would it ever have been considered a pandemic? Or maybe it would have been a pandemic that never really pierced the pubic conscience, like Swine Flu? (probably not quite, considering social media) Maybe we would have chalked it up as just another coronavirus like the relatively tame ones that have been around our entire lives, something whose emergence would be seen as little more than a scientific curiosity?

Also, I just checked the covid stats in my state for the first time in forever, recorded covid deaths have basically been near single digits per week going all the way back to last Spring, in a state of over 6 million people. Have we really been in a pandemic the last 8 months? 

I can say that for me *personally*, the pandemic essentially ended when I moved from a blue state to a red state in late summer of 2021.