SARS-CoV-2 is very much still an epidemic and the BA.4 and BA.5 variants are spreading around the world, displacing previous ‘Omicron’ variants that previously displaced ‘Alpha’ and ‘Delta’ variants. In the United States, it is true that the 7 day running average on deaths attributed to COVID-19 since July 2021 but notice that we’ve had two major peaks between then and now corresponding to the B.1.617.2 (‘Delta’), and B.1.1.529 (‘Omicron Prime’) variants. The fewer number of deaths during those spikes despite the increased transmissibility can be largely attributed to inoculation from vaccines and exposure to prior variants providing some immunogenicity sufficient to protect most people from severe morbidity and mortality but the newer variants are showing increased immune escape with many people reporting repeated reinfection. Of course, around the world in countries where vaccine availability and/or uptake has not been as good as in the United States and Western Europe, there have been massive outbreaks with a much larger proportion of case fatality rates among naive populations (e.g. China).
There remains the likelihood (to near certainty) of additional variants that could have even greater immune escape or more virulence. There is no reason to think that this cannot happen; the closely related SARS-CoV(-1) , responsible for the 2002-04 SARS outbreak had a case fatality rate of ~11%, and MERS-CoV (more distant but still in the lineage of Betacoronavirus) has a mortality rate of ~34% (fortunately not very transmissible from person-to-person). Even a SARS-CoV-2 variant with 1% CFR would rapidly eclipse the current deaths from COVID-19. This isn’t a reason to keep everything shut down because this virus is never going to stop circulating and mutating (hopefully it will eventually transform into a benign ‘common cold’ providing immunogenicity against more virulent but less transmissible variants) but it is a reason to maintain epidemiological surveillance.
Stranger