Smoking is a great analogy, it's distributed exactly like secondhand smoke, causes chronic inflammation in the lungs, systemic health issues, and for now most people don't believe in it! Problem is covid may be dangerous in even smaller doses than smoke.
I heard a quip that the east way to tell whether omicron is in a room was “is there air in the room?” (When omicron was new.)
Basically the new variants are so transmissible that if they’re in an area it’s like avoiding a tsunami.
Which isn’t to say individual avoidance should be given up. Do as much as you want (and I still wear N95 and gloves in certain situations). But society writ large can’t abate this level of spread.
We could see growing numbers of long covid sufferers for quite some time. Or, the virus might give us a break as sometimes happens in outbreaks. We should all hope it doesn’t mutate into something far worse, but it can’t be ruled out.
