There’s that prototypical dichotomous thinking again:
“Things are improving” doesn’t mean “bad things have completely stopped happening”. A line zig-zagging up and down can still have strong, noticeable downward trend.
Yeah try not electing a sociopathic narcissist who panders to a fundamentalist religious audience with his “two corinthians”, “I like all the verses”, and holding a Bible upside down, who then proceeds to demonize his own infectious disease expert and mock people who wear masks. At least to a first approximation, that might have gone some way towards not at least exacerbating the problem.
But in any case, the roughly 100-year-since-the-last-time occurrence of a pandemic can hardly be said to constitute any kind of evidence that the overall trend in the living conditions of humans is not improving.