Imagine a disease that kills about 1.6m people a year die, and that is despite having a vaccination against it for decades. It is spread by people speaking, coughing, singing, etc. An R number has never been properly defined, but most studies have it around 1, but could be up to 4 in certain settings. The CFR is between 7 and 35%. Survivors can see a 20% increase of early mortality from other causes. On top of this, between 1 in 3 and 1 in 5 people globally could have a latent infection of it. However, if it doesn't develop into a full infection then it won't transmit.
It sounds like a really grim form of COVID right? Actually this is tuberculosis, and is the second largest infectious disease killer in the world (after HIV). Now it's rates are rising again after years of decline due to all the funding and resources being diverted to COVID.
I don't recall any global meltdown to help TB control. And I certainly don't recall a mass testing regime to source the latent infections, as it is utterly pointless, as it is for COVID, and would probably paralyse the world. The key problem with Tb has been the expense of testing for it, yet all this money has been found for COVID (probably because it's something the first world has experienced and made a priority).
It's time we reprioritised and put COVID into proper perspective. Yes it was nasty and unknown at first , but omicron should be the normalisation of it. The testing of healthy people really needs to stop, along with the stigmatising of infected people with no symptoms. Then immediately efforts need to make sure our finite health and research resources are rediverted to the conditions that kill, maim and affect a lot more people.