- for many - not all, but many - of the more vulnerable to hospitalization and death, it's now a matter of choice.

- As a result, a bigger spike in cases caused much fewer hospitalizations and deaths than previous spikes, meaning less impact on the rest of the health system.

- behavior has changed dramatically in terms of things like event attendance even in areas with more cautious government policy. Compare how many people went to movie theaters in late summer 2020 when they reopened in limited capacity in California with now. The limited capacity isn't the biggest difference, it's the behavior.

- we can see that, say, California has fewer cumulative deaths per capita than Texas or Florida despite the urban areas being somewhat denser[0] (which itself seems to play a big role), and Arizona has more than NY or Massachusets despite being far less dense and with much milder winters... but the differences aren't orders of magnitudes.

- masks are cheaper and more available than they were earlier, and treatments are becoming more widely available too

So this is a reasonable point to say "we aren't able to eliminate this thing, but fortunately, it's much less dangerous to most of us than it used to be."

But make no mistakes: the biggest factor there in terms of danger is the vaccines, which have now been available over a year.

[0] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/cumulative-covid-1...