How COVID-19 Died

The implication here is that the sane response to COVID-19 was to ignore what our scientists were telling us about it.

COVID is gone (at least for now) because enough people acquired a sufficient degree of immunity to the disease, either through vaccinations or through contracting it and living through it, rendering it incapable of spreading any further.

The fictional hardhat in the cartoon here both a) dodged a bullet, and b) prolonged the disease and its impact on our civilization.