"Richard Keller, a medical historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says that much of the current pandemic rhetoric..."

"... the premature talk of endemicity; the focus on comorbidities; the from-COVID-or-with-COVID debate—treats COVID deaths as dismissible and 'so inevitable as to not merit precaution,' he has written. 'Like gun violence, overdose, extreme heat death, heart disease, and smoking, [COVID] becomes increasingly associated with behavioral choice and individual responsibility, and therefore increasingly invisible.' We don’t honor deaths that we ascribe to individual failings, which could explain, Keller argues, why national moments of mourning have been scarce. There have been few pandemic memorials, save some moving but temporary art projects. Resolutions to turn the first Monday of March into a COVID-19 Victims and Survivors Memorial Day have stalled in the House and Senate. Instead, the U.S. is engaged in what Keller calls 'an active process of forgetting.' If safety is now a matter of personal responsibility, then so is remembrance."

From "How Did This Many Deaths Become Normal?/The U.S. is nearing 1 million recorded COVID-19 deaths without the social reckoning that such a tragedy should provoke. Why?" by Ed Yong (The Atlantic).