Needless to say, this did not turn out to be the case. But as to why we continued to live under the thumb of public health after they'd seemingly voided their authority, well, that's a rich topic. It's one that Matthew Crawford addresses here, suggesting that both COVID and the racial reckoning shared a common purpose. A new―or at least unfamiliar to us―ethic was being put into place, placing the utmost importance on deference to authority.
This antihumanism, as Crawford calls it, also extends to the apocalyptic embrace of artificial intelligence in recent years, which is based on the concept that human thinking and mechanical computation are in essence the same thing, a task the machines do better. In the opening anecdote a Google engineer sees the malfunction of one of the company's autonomous cars as prove that humans need to become "less idiotic." Sadly this does not seem to have been self-deprecation on his part.
