IMO no government in the US is going to indefinitely ban large indoor gatherings, indoor dining, bars, schools/universities as usual, physical conferences, etc. And any "rules" notwithstanding I fully expect that when summer rolls around and a lot of people, especially the more vulnerable, have been vaccinated whether it's imperfectly or not are going to back to beaches, bars, concerts, etc. At some point, it's just another disease of which there are many that sometimes kills people.
All pandemics end eventually, but it depends right? It depends on hospital capacity and how infectious and lethal the variants are and if the vaccines work and how fast the spread is. Not to mention super spreader events.
Covid wild-type was/is bad enough to crush global hospital systems so that's really a big issue. It will take years to train more doctors and nurses to run covid wards if that's something we decide to do.
Also things won't go back to normal because our hyper-globalization and world wide travel has definitely increased the risk of pandemics. So we have to think of the next unknown one, use technology to prepare as well as implement risk reduction processes. Covid testing for international travel will probably never go away.
