While “next” is technically correct, it’ll be far worse than Covid was/is.
Covid was our practice round and we failed.
Not only is Bird Flu orders of magnitude more deadly than Covid, people are so thoroughly sick of pandemic protocols that we’ll never get the kind of mask adoption we saw during Covid and even that was abysmal.
Employers will never allow people to work from home again if they can help it, they’re still Fighting to claw the rest back now.