Its deflationary and safe-heaven characteristics were recognized and everyone became abruptly bullish.
Lol, I don't think that's quite what happened. More like governments across the globe have been providing their citizens with free money in the form of stimulus, and people have been blowing said money on all sorts of speculative investments, bitcoin and other cryptos being among them. That and big purchases by deep-pocketed companies like MicroStrategy, Tesla, and others have led to the crazy bull market we're in--not that people suddenly realized the fundamental value of bitcoin.
As for what's going to happen to bitcoin (and the altcoin market, too) after COVID-19, I get a queasy feeling in my stomach when I think about what'll happen when interest rates start to rise or if unemployment starts to go up, in addition to the inflation of the USD that I've been expecting for years now. In other words, if the economy in general gets fucked up bitcoin and all of its little duckling alts are going to suffer. Massively.
However, I'm hoping for the best. These have certainly been some of the darkest days of my lifetime, and I've got my fingers crossed that things
aren't going to get worse. Should that be the case, it ought to bode well for bitcoin.