It would have been better at the start if the government woudl have said, pandemics last 2-3 years Be prepared to accept that your plans will be cancelled until 2023. If you don’t have expectations that things “will be back to normal’ before that, you don’t get disappointed.
Instead they overpromised and underdelivered, relied on vaccines to do it all, when other factors are important (masks, social distancing, working from home). And a lot of people died and are chronically ill, and the NHS workers have been through hell and back.
And, Long Covid remains the elephant in the room, and my experience is no one wants to hear about it. It is the new post viral fatigue/ME/chornic fatigue/Potts syndrome, it has a complex set of symptoms, and because it isn’t black and white and takes nuance to understand, a lot of people will deny it exists.. The government won’t have the money to care for these folks long term, and the taxpayer won’t want to pay for it. And, because post-viral disease affects women more than men (as women are more likely to have auto immune diseases and in health care research, are still a lower priority), the sufferers will be told—-oh, all in your head, or are you work shy, or you have to learn to manage your illness via yoga and mindfulness.
Hey, but roll on Christmas, let’s get the infections really going at great guns, and, as usual, put restrictions in, too little too late. And more people will die, more will become chronically ill, the NHS will be overwhelmed and so it goes until the virus will probably burn itself out in 2023.