I can totally relate to where you're coming from.

In South Africa we've had hard lock-downs and it's been a fuck-up on all fronts.
I can't go into all the details and nuance, but in summary:
1. Our health infrastructure is not capable of handling massive infection rates
2. Our economy isn't stable enough to handle long periods of lock-down.
3. Our government isn't capable of supporting high unemployment levels

So either we die of COVID or we die of starvation (I say "we" but I mean "poor people who were already struggling to make ends meet")

A lot of people see the lockdown as the bigger problem, and that we need to save the economy as priority. But I don't see how an economy that doesn't work for the majority of people is worth saving. Shouldn't an economy have fail-safes built in for this kind of thing?
It's not like we're immune to the forces of disaster.

I can see how this will play out: we get vaccines, in a year's time things are stable again. Elections will happen and people will vote for the same politicians who stole massive amounts of COVID relief funds. And the rest of us will forget that our society is so fragile that it can be taken down by a bit of fucking mucus in the air.

/rant

Yeah, that's about the level of fucked we are. You have my sympathies. It's almost like lockdowns have been removed from the mental options of people around me. Florida stopped lockdowns back in July and because the gov never gave us any real financial support, the idea of locking back down doesn't even come back up. When I point out that the news doesn't even mention flattening the curve anymore, people get like a "lightbulb!" look, but it quickly dims and they look at me like a I'm a conspiracy theorist. Like we literally didn't have a handful of astroturfed lockdown and mask protests that were funded by billionaires and got insane amounts of news coverage.

It's kind of funny, because people think I'm a pessimist about all this shit, but really I'm typically a hopeful person. I yell about this shit over and over because I have faith that eventually the people around me will come to their senses and see they're being taken advantage of but... it's rough. I know I've said this before around here, but I see Covid like a fire drill compared to the disasters Climate Change is going to bring into our lives and motherfuckers are just refusing to leave the building. :(

I don't see anything pessimistic about seeing issues that need addressing in order to mitigate bigger problems further down the line.
In fact that's reasonable. Pessimism would be the attitude of "well there's nothing we can do to change anything" but that's bullshit.
The way we live currently has been the status quo for a handful of generations, why not take another handful of generations to correct for errors.

I like your fire drill analogy, because it's sadly the case. Let's hope we see things turn around in our lifetimes

I think we (the collective, aggregate we) get stuck in the existing paradigm too easily. Covid fucked shit up, social institutions have never been weaker. This should have been the perfect time for people to say, "When we rebuild, we should rebuild differently, rebuild better." Instead, we've focused on trying to preserve the state of things before covid hit, and to such an extreme extent we are perfectly willing to let people die to do so. I wouldn't call it a fear of change, per se, but the human unwillingness to change at all is overriding the fear of death. I don't have a point to make, I'm just rambling.