Lock down

People don't do well wrapping their heads around how they factor into large population-level phenomenon. This virus has a very small chance of being lethal to any given individual, yet at the same time is guaranteed to kill thousands a day.

Unless that risk hits close to home it takes an enormous sense of social responsibility and abstract thinking to look at that equation and choose self-sacrifice and inconvenience either short term or long term.

Fatalism also runs deep in the United States. If it happens, then it was meant to be. If I get sick, then I get sick.... Yet, few people would choose such an outcome prior to it becoming a possibility.

Very few things about life today in the developed world encourages patience, delayed gratification, or self-sacrifice for a common good.

We're already quite used to rationalizing our individual actions as either inconsequential or excusable while "everybody else" is the problem.
 
Most of the people we talk to say the virus comes from the media, and the media is where anyone hears of the number of people that die from the virus. And we even know of a few people that died this year that had medical problems, one of them if they listed as a covid death he got it 5 or so years ago.
 
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