2022 May be the last year for Covid restrictions

@jimm619 said
As society evolves, and more are vaxxed
it will go the way of Mumps, Polio, Smallpox, etc.
No one boycotts these vaccines.

Mumps, Polio and smallpox are one-time sterilizing vaccines. The COVID vaccines are great at mitigating illness, but are only kinda sorta good at stopping infection and transmission (and will no doubt require annual boosters to be effective). In that way, they're much more comparable to the flu vaccine and that's how they'll continue to operate.

@sh76 said
But governments are starting to realize that people are not going to tolerate having their lives restricted based on a threat from an endemic respiratory virus forever.

Covid mandates and restrictions were never meant to be "forever". There was an assumption that enough people would comply with them and that the pandemic would've passed by already as a result.

Sadly, right from the start, too many people adhered to political partisanship and misinformation for this to be the case.

@vivify said
Covid mandates and restrictions were never meant to be "forever". There was an assumption that enough people would comply with them and that the pandemic would've passed by already as a result.

Sadly, right from the start, too many people adhered to political partisanship and misinformation for this to be the case.

===There was an assumption that enough people would comply with them and that the pandemic would've passed by already as a result.===

If that was the assumption, it was never realistic. I'm not saying people didn't hope for that in 2020 (I sure did), but it was never realistic in retrospect. COVID has infinite reservoirs, is more transmissible than the common cold and rarely disables its spreaders. It's super-evolved (or manufactured, as the case may be) to spread. The vaccines may slow spread, but they don't come close to stopping it.

COVID isn't "passing" any more than the common cold is "passing."

I'm not saying political stupidity hadn't plagued COVID policy from the beginning, but there is zero cause-and-effect relationship between political stupidity and COVID still being around now.

@sh76 said
Mumps, Polio and smallpox are one-time sterilizing vaccines. The COVID vaccines are great at mitigating illness, but are only kinda sorta good at stopping infection and transmission (and will no doubt require annual boosters to be effective). In that way, they're much more comparable to the flu vaccine and that's how they'll continue to operate.

You're an immunologist?
Definitive answer;
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/02/07/1057245449/the-future-of-the-pandemic-is-looking-clearer-as-we-learn-more-about-infection