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Daniel T's avatar

This strongly reflects my experience living through this thing.

First, due to a series of continual failures, I am a car crash lawyer. I can tell you that everyone underrates how dangerous those damn things are. When you're daily exposed to the horrors of the automobile - rarely a day goes by I don't talk to someone involved in a fatal crash - it really changes your risk assessment of those beasts. I probably spend more time thinking about dying on the road than most of the other readers combined. Maybe that improves my overall risk management abilities, I don't know, but it does make that analogy - and the general abandonment of risk/reward thinking - stand out. Covid sucked, my heart is still screwed up, but if the alternative is perpetual April 2020 I know choice I'm making.

Second, I was definitely one of these people briefly. It was in January when my boss dictated we had to return to the office. Looking back, I realized it was emotionally driven because I liked my life at that point. My job sucked, I liked WFH, I could still have a social life, bars were mostly empty (my dream come true), roads weren't full of traffic, I had lots of free time. I wanted that version of the pandemic to last forever.

I don't think I was unusual. I would wager that a lot of people on either side of this divide are there because (subconsciously) they either prefer the current version of their life to pre-pandemic or they are the opposite. We overrate how much of our thinking is rational.

Finally, I would note there's an element absent from this piece that is related to last week's: war is fun. The desire for the never ending emergency is very similar to the desire for war. Most educated people realize (on some level at least) the sheer fucking meaninglessness of our existence. We were promised more and yet here we end up in bullshit jobs that we know make no difference. If my life was dedicated to writing articles about Trevor Noah for the Daily Beast, I'd want something to give my life meaning. The pandemic, like war, does that. Suddenly, my life writing listicles on "14 Times a Trans POC DESTROYED Mitch McConnell" is really important because I'm saving lives. By, ya know, staying inside and ordering Doordash. There's a lot of the last 20 years - whether it's fighting climate doom, saving civilization from radical Islam, stopping the trans genocide, averting the Hitlerian menace of Saddam/Putin/Xi/Whomever - that's just people trying to infuse their lives with meaning. Isn't the pandemic just, like, the best and easiest way to do that?

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Snoot's avatar

While I don't doubt that a significant amount of the Covid panic is status-seeking behaviour, we cannot underestimate the number of people who have been brainwashed to the degree they are legitimately afraid of death by Covid. Many people in my social circle have a true, honest fear of the disease to a degree that completely outstrips their actual risk from it.

Lately I've taken to asking people in my circle what they believe is the actual rate of hospitalization of the unvaccinated. Most people so far have replied somewhere from 30-40%, which is dramatically higher than actual reported rates which sit somewhere <1%. These are not virtue-signaling types, but regular people who perhaps consume a little too much news and are a less likely than average to start their own investigations and review the data (or "the science") themselves.

I have also seen a lot of very bad or outright deceptive presentations of statistics. My doctor's office sent out an email a few months ago trying to assuage parent concerns about heart issues from Covid vaccines. They included a chart that showed heart problems in children and youth from Covid itself - trying to convince parents that the risk of heart problems from Covid was far greater than from the shot itself. Naturally, they decided not to highlight that the chart showed heart issues in only *hospitalized* children and youth which is a far cry from the general population. I assume most people would gloss over the little descriptive label that indicated where the data was collected from, and would therefore not be seeing the entire picture.

The irony of this all is that many of these people frequently parrot the "trust the science" narrative but then have an approach that is far closer to "trust the media".

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