I think the majority have tried to "get over it" from the sense that we're going about whatever daily lives we have managed to reconstruct, but the impact still lingers, for some far more than others as posts here illustrate.
Dismissal of people's negative experiences and denying them the chance to even talk about it is actually very illustrative of one long term impact in itself.
And people forget that practical impact was still evident into 2022.
My late DP collapsed with a major brain bleed in January 2022. He was rushed to our local hospital and subsequently transferred to the next county for life saving surgery. Thing is, he tested positive for Covid, complete symptomless, at hospital A, so we had to go home, and wait, for two weeks.
He came round from the operation and things were looking good. I had one phone call with him where he was obviously high as a kite, but then he deteriorated. Ten days later they confirmed, by phone, he'd had a second catastrophic bleed and wasn't coming back. I received that news on my birthday. I had to beg, plead and cry, in my 50s, to be allowed to go and see him despite technically it being against the rules. Thankfully, I and his frail, elderly Dad were allowed special dispensation. It was "too late" of course, he was "gone" and although he remained on life support fir a further 10 days, we were still mired in Covid bureaucracy.
Visiting was limited to every other day, for one hour, only two people - ideally the same two people, and dependent on a negative Covid test. When "pull the plug" time came, there was more leniency and compassion to be fair, but sitting by his bedside for 72 hours waiting for him to breathe his last was poor compensation for missing his last lucid window.
Add into the mix his initial collapse was less than a week after his second booster. He had dutifully had the vaccine for his work, as he was a body piercer, so had no option if he wanted to work compliantly. So for five months, I wondered, and waited, as histopathology took that long to figure out his actual cause of death. Turned out it was undiagnosed, virtually symptomless cancer that had quietly ravaged his throat, liver, lungs and brain, finally. I do still wonder if there was any connection but have to "accept" I'll never know whether the booster contributed to his demise due to that existing weakness. Or whether, if we hadn't been in lockdown, he might have felt more confident about going to the doctors for his persistent and worsening indigestion which was the only sign of anything wrong. Yes, there may have been lifestyle and genetic components at play, as his Dad had survived the same cancer. But lockdown definitely played a part in his reluctance to seek help, as in the first month if lockdown, my mother had come to live with us as she was in her last month of life with ovarian cancer, and we experienced first hand the chaos of trying to access palliative care or any other support "because Covid". The Macmillan nurses vanished into thin air, and our one saving grace were fabulous district nurses who came every other day to do "the draining". It was hell, and it destroyed our confidence in healthcare.
In fact, when it became obvious that Mum wasn't safe to live alone, we had to orchestrate her move to our house, where we were very fortunate to have a room with an ensuite to accommodate her. It went thus:
I rang Macmillan to ask for help, support and guidance for the transfer, to be told by the receptionist it was against the rules, and no, we couldn't speak to a HCP. We then contacted Mum's GP who thankfully was far more sensible. She listened to the fact that I could not move in to her tiny one bed flat, and that Mum was starting to have falls, identified she needed 24 hours in hospital to level out her sodium etc, and she was admitted. I'll never forget watching them lead my stoic and uncharacteristically tearful Mum into the ambulance that night, wondering if I would ever see her again, then orchestrating getting her furniture and necessities to our house for the next day when she was discharged
Fortunately we knew a man with a van, who learning of what was going on, was as "fuck the rules" as we were, and we managed it. I still don't really know how, but we did, and thankfully, tough though it was, we were lucky to be able to be Mum's bubble until the end. But I lived with the fear that some officious that would try and take custody if her because we'd broken the rules, even though it was in her best interests to do so, despite the fact that hospice care was not even an option.
Fuck me, I have buried and "got over" so much. And when I think of all those who were separated from dying loved ones, my heart absolutely breaks. And those who's health deteriorated far more than it needed to because everything ground to a halt for Covid.
Currently there's all this rhetoric and propaganda around sick and disabled people draining the economy and hoovering up benefits, but what is conveniently ignored is that the uptick in claimants is tied up with the pandemic time scale. Mismanagement of overall non Covid health issues, both physical and mental,is a huge part of that, and it is vile and victim blaming to ignore that.
As for the vaccine - I never got it. Had bad reactions as a child, I'm not particularly vulnerable and I felt confident in taking my chances. It wasn't a conspiracy thing, it was a personal thing. Five years on, I'm glad I didn't, for so many more reasons.
Lockdown was a shit show as far as I'm concerned.