I think we’re starting to see that whilst “we need to learn to live with this” is an admirable objective, translating it into actual concrete steps is very difficult.
Unless you control and limit the overall rate of infection, you very quickly run into an inability to isolate those who are vulnerable from those who are infected. Clearly that includes those working in hospitals, but is much wider including the caring and other critical services.
So you’re left with a Hobson’s choice of isolating and removing people from the workforce (and services are negatively impacted by reduced numbers of available staff, ultimately causing increasing rates of severe illness and death from services not provided) or adopting a more lax approach to isolation and exposing the most vulnerable in huge numbers (who are still at risk of death and serious illness).
When people say Covid has caused huge deterioration in the provision of other areas of medicine like oncology etc., this is precisely why, yet it is somehow expressed as if there was a glaringly obvious way to manage this conundrum that has been missed. If anyone has a solution to this it would be great to hear it.