I think part of the issue is semantics: People think that “controlled” is as much as an absolute as “uncontrolled”. Control over such things will never be absolute as medicine isn’t omnipotent.
And then they’re mardy, thinking “if not for those anti-maskers we would have that absolute control” – nah. They can’t take from the rest of us power that we never had. And even over here in my state with like 85% immunisation and noone griping at masks (wat mutt dat mutt) there’s still cases. That failing (because people don’t become noticeably symptomatic), there’s measurable viral load in wastewater: The bug is still around, just not really an issue any more. We’ve basically forgotten about it at this point, people over 80 or otherwise susceptible get refresher shots, but they’re getting shots against a fuckton of things so it’s not special, any more.
The pandemic got brought into control even with covidiots around. And if it hadn’t been for medicine saving a gazillion lives, our collective immune system would’ve done it in a decade or two.