Obviously the pandemic is not currently over and will not be in the foreseeable future. For this discussion, assume that the actual end of the pandemic would be when there is no more elevated risk of sickness/disabling relative to the norm before COVID.
The world has decided on a vaccine-only strategy where a majority of the populace does not get vaccinated which isn't going to do anything. The concept of herd immunity through "natural infection" is even less effective, as we can see with the many cases of reinfection. Even something as mild as mask mandates are non-viable in the US.
So, assuming no mitigations are implemented again... how does the pandemic actually end? Is it just gambling on eventually getting a mild strain that actually becomes "a bad flu"? Do we have any historical data on what kind of timeframe we can expect here?
Or is it just going to be like this forever?
I've never looked in to it in detail, but my understanding is that the vast amount of death (like 30% of the population) during the Black Plague in Europe massively shifted labor relations for several generations until the population returned to it's pre-plague levels. For a while peasants and other laborers could essentially name their price because labor was so scarce.
There was a century of peasants revolting against the feudal nobility in places like England, France, Germany, and others, not just because of the plague but also because of the nobles' general wastefulness and incompetence stemming from the Hundred Years' War. Sometimes the peasants would even take over cities like London or Paris, but then they would lib the fuck out, beg the king for help, and get destroyed. When it was over, we had capitalism in England, absolutism in France, and another century at least of religious wars to look forward to, which themselves probably only chilled out in the end because of colonialism.
Good books about this: A Distant Mirror, The Origin of Capitalism, Caliban and the Witch, Marx's chapters in capital which deal with capitalism's beginnings (a much easier read than the earlier chapters of Capital). A People's History of the World is also good IMO. I like the author's thesis that history is basically the history of class struggle (heh), meaning that the ruling class is always looking for new ways to extract surplus labor, regardless of whether that's through slavery, feudalism, or capitalism. The book is pretty good until it gets to the Russian Revolution, because the author is a Trotskyist.
Hmm. How do we avoid the pitfalls our predecessors fell into?
If you actually manage to seize power, don’t lib out. Go all the way!