The worst case scenario for Humanity is achieved, and aided and abetted by the incompetency of the decayed Western societies.
They basically had two choices. Go the severe but most effective route, as China did, and restrict the populations freedumbs severely for a temporary amount of time, that it would cause the extinction of the virus. This would have worked in China too if not for the horrible efforts of the West, and the developing world, which will instead continue to result in occasional clusters being developed in China (but which China will take care of).
If the West and the developing world had done what China did (well that's assuming their populations could even be like the Chinese and other conformist cultures, which is unlikely to begin with so it was likely hopeless for them from the start) then the world wouldn't have to deal with this virus ever again. But apparently the West was too weak to even consider such severe quarantines, even for a month or so to cause its extinction.
So now we are left with a globally circulating virus (sans China) which will continue to evolve into many different variants for the foreseeable future. The only other thing they could have done to prevent this is just promote everyone into getting the virus as rapidly as possible, thereby experiencing mass death and disease quickly, giving the virus a catastrophic and rapid decrease in the potential for new infections, thereby causing it to starve out. Yes, it would be worse in the very short term than just letting people develop infections slowly (like the UK and Sweden tried), but it would be a one-time cost versus what we are seeing now (which is not just longer in duration and therefore total deaths but also feeding the virus to evolve resistance to vaccines and potentially even increase its infectivity and lethality).
But no, they chose neither route, and ended up with this middle ground of some populations attempting to quarantine and others exposing themselves freely to the virus as if the pandemic is a hoax. An absolute worst-case scenario.
This is why China is very afraid of the virus ever spreading, even risking the economy in the short term if it has to. We don't know when or how, but next month, next year, next decade, there could be a variant which is more infectious *and* more deadly, and with little vaccine effectiveness to boot.
This is not inevitable, but there is no law of nature preventing this nor making it extremely unlikely. With the 'experiment' going on in the US and other countries which are practicing both quarantine measures and mass exposure (depending on state, political affiliation, etc.) they are giving the virus the time necessary to continue evolving in a permissive yet simultaneously competitive environment.