It's been a real eye opener in many ways and for me it is a reminder that ultimately you have to take control of your own life and can only do the best you can to protect yourself. It's apparent that lockdowns aren't a foolproof way to stop disease, so you can't actually rely on authoritarian measures to save you. Imagine if this had been a disease with a 50% death rate.
I do wonder, though, if we'd have as many nonbelievers if these measures hadn't been so draconian. While I realise it's been much worse in some countries than others (whether that's down to the virus genome, pollution levels, the general health of the populous or all of the above, I don't honestly know), it hasn't ended up being as deadly as first predicted and many are seeing this as overkill.
!tipu curate
Hey, @minismallholding.
There has been so much information, disinformation, misinformation, jumping to conclusions without evidence, from all sides concerned, that it's just a big mess.
And none of it helps to foster any kind of unity or desire to comply voluntarily. Some would consider that to be by design. I don't know if everyone involved wants chaos, or to burn systems down, so they can take over, but I'm sure they exist, and they pick and choose their battles. A pandemic, that may have or may not have started in a laboratory in one country, aided in some way by at least one other country, if not many, seems tailored made for such folks, fabricated or not.
I do believe, though, if precautions had been taken to safeguard the most vulnerable, and the rest of us had been given whatever information is available at any given time to help us make informed decisions, even if that means we're gathering it on our own, and then we're thinking a little bit more about others than we are about ourselves (kind of like what seems to happen around Christmas time as opposed to the rest of the year), I think it would have been better.
There's an article out that the reason why youth, which I guess we're talking public school ages, so K-12, have not been hit nearly as much as older groups is because around 40% of them already have coronavirus anti-bodies in their systems. So while this is considered a novel coronavirus, with potentially many strains now roaming around, the general makeup of it is similar enough that these naturally acquired antibodies can fight them off.
I've always thought as public schools as being a breeding ground for disease, and thus, not a positive thing. But apparently, potential immunity is one thing that is coming out of it. :)
There's also a new study out of Denmark that that basically states that you only improve your chances of not getting the virus by 0.3% at best if you actually wear a mask properly. Otherwise, its indistinguishable, if not worse, than if you were to go without.
So, yeah, between the fanatical believers who think no shutdown for any length of time is too great, all the way to the other fringe who deny the existence or the potential deadliness of it, the vast majority of us are held hostage in the middle.