My advice, stop reading so much news.
No one, NO ONE, knows how long this will or won’t last.
I choose to be optimistic and side with the articles saying Omicron may be the end and in a couple months the world will be even more normal, until something changes there’s no benefit in believing the doom and gloom over the sunny predictions.
The good news is a we’ve now got vaccines that are effective at preventing most serious cases, the world is back open, and life is 90% normal. Focus on the positive rather than the negative!
But your signal that "everything is fine unless proven otherwise" is a signal for for-profit businesses, and government leaders to make the same choice. Which means no testing resources, no mask improvements, discontinuation of COVID sick leave policies, no backup labor plans for healthcare and schools especially, but anywhere. How do entities properly prepare for an alternate outcome if only a tiny minority of people (even if they are the best qualified to predict the necessity) even think it's necessary? That's what happened here, and it will happen after Omicron too. People still think they can just run out the clock so any other plans are wasteful and unnecessary.
People call Omicron our best case for ending this while knowing that a virus' best cast scenario is a massive infection wave which provides a greater chance to acquire advantageous mutations. I saw a study this morning that is bringing into doubt the reasons why Omicron spread so fast. It may not be as intrinsically more transmissive than Delta as postulated. It's advantage might very well be predominately from the immune escape. Which does not bode well for Omicron being the final round, given the number of infections and therefore possible mutation opportunities.
But no one will believe it until it happens. Which is not good for preparation.
If everyone is so gung ho about "living with it." That can't mean things like crowd-sourcing a neuro ICU bed via Twitter (which I saw the other night) or transferring pathologists to ICU care, when even other pathologists say their only benefit would be the same as a nursing assistant assistant since their skills have diverged since medical school (another thing I saw on Twitter). If testing is required to obtain paid sick leave benefits, or to make sure that when you show up for your scheduled cruise you aren't denied boarding because your required PCR showed up as positive after you recovered from your recent infection, and who knows what rules your insurance plan will set for covered expenses, you can't declare testing as unnecessary (also, in all this "freedom" why isn't the right to know what you are afflicted with instead of guessing part of it?). Otherwise, "living with it" without any plan for the logistics becomes just like all the other times people said things like "just protect the vulnerable." Empty words to justify doing nothing. (I know the last bits you haven't been advocating for, but goes to the more general "living with it" strategy).
It's not like anyone has been telling people with the power to plan "Can you please continue to do all the necessary thinking about this stuff, so we, the general public can be confident someone is so we don't have to." The free market could have had the things we needed to avoid going into these waves so unprepared, but they thought they were just as unnecessary as anyone else until it became clear how necessary things were. Or since FDA regulations have been up as a legitimate roadblock doing more to make that part of the national conversation (but apparently it wasn't worth the fight.) They aren't going to be the white knight in all of this either, with how loudly everyone else is signaling.