People tend to forget that we experience pandemics every now and then. In-between life is “normal”. Just remember the famous picture of police men having all a mask on from 1918 or so. I am sure they were gone by 1920 or so
exactly, as far as the previous pandemics go this one is fairly mild, have you heard of the Hong Kong flu of 1968? Killed over a million people, we haven't even heard of it.
From the WSJ article that fact is sourced from: "A vaccine was developed relatively quickly—researchers had learned from the other two 20th-century influenza pandemics, the Spanish Flu of 1918 and the Asian flu of 1957—but wasn’t widely available before the disease had reached its second peak in most countries." So basically, there was a vaccine much faster than we could expect one for this coronavirus, but it was still too late to help much. (See https://archive.is/5pYqk for the full text of the article, which is quite interesting.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu
we won't forget this virus for long time, but not because of the damage it does, but because of the damage we did to ourselves