Do you think we’ll ever get to a point where Covid is like HIV, in the sense “you should try to avoid getting it, but if you do get it, it’s not the end of the world, you can just take some medicines that makes it virtually unnoticeable and live like normal”?
That's not a question I'm equipped to answer, but I can answer why even the people equipped to answer that question can't really answer that question either.
Covid mutates rapidly and unpredictably. If it trends back towards Delta mutations, it can be as transmissible as measles and several times deadlier than it is at the moment. It could also continue this big air quotes "mild" omicron trend which seems to cause more frequent neurological long term issues which presents an entirely different problem which is going underaddressed and still isn't mechanistically understood.
We don't have any treatments for long covid, and with more than 200 symptoms and sequelae known to be tied to covid infection, that's a lot of ground to cover. Many studies on long covid have been postponed or canceled because of revoked funding. Most studies on treatment are still focused on drug repurposing for symptom management, not root cause treatment. Several drugs held up as potential silver bullets in the past few years have been shown by randomized control trials to have little to no effect on long covid outcomes, both in the acute and post-acute phases of the disease.
The best way to avoid months-to-years long effects from post-covid recovery (if you're one of the lucky ones who does get back to a near-baseline) is to avoid catching covid. We have no infrastructure left to do that, and the people taking their safety into their own hands are frequently mocked, othered, over-surveiled, and abandoned by community, friends, and family. Until we have a society willing to clean the air and accept their small part in maintaining the public health, we will never be where you'd like to be in your ask. Because unlike AIDS, covid is airborne and circulates in many places year round.
If this crisis is ever properly addressed, it will never truly be "just take some medicines and you can basically ignore it" because of the full-body effects of the disease (it's not just getting an immune system working, it's rooting out microclots and replacing organs and nectotizing bones and countless mental issues and blunted immune systems and malfunctioning mitochondria and damaged golgi bodies and fused nerve cells and on and on and on) and because of the sheer scale of this crisis. Since the AIDS crisis began in the 70s, there have been approximately 91.4 million cases confirmed. In just six years, there are already over 400 million estimated long covid cases based on analysis of medical records. The scale is staggering, and that's a big part of why people refuse to look at it.
To make even the most educated guesstimate about what you want to know begins delving into the realms of science fiction and attempting to predict the future. And even in avoiding those, what you want to come about may never come about because these two crises have similar shapes but completely different masses and internal structures.
