Except no one pushed for business as usual? Quarantines and higher level pandemic interventions are not appropriate for an endemic infection. We should be vaccinating and masking when there's an increase in Covid infections. But we should also be doing that for influenza and we don't.
I'm not arguing semantics. Pandemic vs. endemic is a factual epidemiological definition. The problem is that we routinely choose not to deal with dangerous endemic infections like influenza. We should always have been doing more.