In the last year there hasn't been any crazy new variants (until this summer/fall anyway) so it hasn't been as deadly. As mutations are random, that's not unexpected. It will be like the flu, where there are good and bad years, but in this case it's more like periods of 3-6 months since covid isn't seasonal. After things were declared normal, covid has been killing about 4x as many people as a typical flu year. This past year has been an exception because the 2024-2025 winter was the worst flu season in 15 years, and this coming winter might be worse. (yes, that will be "worst flu season in a decade" two years in a row).

So this past year covid was just slightly less deadly than the worst flu season we've seen since the swine flu pandemic. This is being reported as if covid has finally become less dangerous than the flu, which I think is a bit misleading.

And while there are long term health conditions that can result from the flu, covid will always be worse and lead to more health problems due primarily to it's ace2 binding ability, along with the toll it takes on the immune system (opens you up to worse infections of other diseases, like the flu, because your body can't respond to it as well as it should) and increased risk of vascular problems. There is also no cure for long covid, which can be a wide array of problems due to covid being able to attack every organ in our body, but the worst form of it resembles ME/CFS and there are no current treatments for it.