I know it was, but you also get that it wasn't all that bad for most people, right?
It occupied this weird middle ground where it was bad enough to kill a pretty significant number of people, but not so bad that we're all shell-shocked survivors suppressing the trauma of burying loved ones. And nobody wants to characterize it like that. Half the people want to act like it was nothing, and the other half want to act like it was the worst catastrophe to afflict the world in modern times.
I did get pretty suck for a few weeks, recovered. My wife ended up with strange nerve damage that had her using a cane in her 40s for about six months, but she got back to normal. A friend got hit by Long Covid and plans out how to nap during the work day so he can make it to quitting time. But I don't know anybody who died from it. I am NOT saying nobody died from it, just that it wasn't so widespread that everybody had direct experience of death, like would be the case in something like a smallpox epidemic. The US saw over a million dead, which is a hell of a lot, but in a country of 350 million it's not "everybody comes out with massive trauma" a lot.
Plagues get a lot worse than that. Bodies weren't left to rot because nobody was left alive to bury them. Nobody straggled into the next town because it wiped out the entire population of their home town. A few years later, lots of people say with a straight face that it was no big deal. Nobody who went through the Black Death was saying it was no big deal a few years later.
I'm afraid Covid set us up for the next pandemic to be far worse than it has to be, because it was just mild enough that a substantial number of people are able to dismiss it. And that attitude is going to carry over the next time some novel virus starts spreading around the world. And that one might kill half the population instead of Edit: and I want to emphasize that this is not a memory-hole thing. In December 2020, one third of Americans polled said that Covid was no more of a threat than the seasonal flu (https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/...). A lot of other polls tell a similar story: right in the worst months of the pandemic, a large minority of Americans still thought it was no big deal. That's while it was going on, not in retrospect.