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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m a nurse who worked during Covid in the hospital. I think the weirdest thing I see is that sometimes it feels like people went through it but came out with different realities? Like when I read someone say “I can’t believe how much we overreacted, etc etc” and my memory of it is still lots of people dying and/or getting really sick. Including co-workers. Like yes, it involved. But it was surreal in 2020 and even parts of 2021. So yes, it changed me. It also made me aware how the US is so politically divided and the days of uniting over something big (pandemic or something else) are gone. 
[/quote]

I think there is nuance here, though, and that part of the problem is that people seem to think there are just two Covid camps, but there aren't.

I am totally with you on 2020 and the idea that Covid was absolutely a big, scary deal, and the initial reaction to shut everything down, start masking up and isolating, was correct and probably the least we could do. I have issues with the initial response but they are entirely about the government's lack of preparedness and proper messaging.

Like it's dumb that people were making their own cloth masks or trying to procure their own masks online. That's part of why masking became so politicized, because there was this idea that if you took Covid seriously, you'd be ready to sew your own mask or spend hundreds of dollars trying to buy masks online. But not everyone can do that. The government should have just handed out masks in public spaces and said "please wear this, it's a pandemic." If instead of special ordering or making a mask in order to go the grocery store, you'd just been handed a surgical mask on your way into the store, I think you would have gotten high compliance with some of this stuff very early on because it would have been seen as just normal public health precautions and not a political statement.

And then there were a bunch of other things where people divided into two, nonsensical camps instead of coming together to find a reasonable solution. Like school closures. I think it was a good idea to close schools in March 2020 and a good idea to be cautious about reopening, making every effort to limit Covid spread and exploring hybrid school, outdoor options, maybe shifting the school calendar up to have more school in the summer when Covid rates were lower, etc. But we had one group of people who were like "who cares, kids don't get Covid, teachers are wimps, schools never should have closed." And another group who was like "virtual school is amazing, there's no learning loss and if there is it doesn't matter, there's no way to have in person school without killing people." And I'm sorry, but they were all wrong, and the upshot is that we screwed over a lot of kids. It's frustrating how unwilling people are to find middle ground, everything is either/or.

It just sometimes feels like we had one group who decided Covid wasn't really, and obviously I wasn't going to join that group. B[b]ut then we had another group that just sort of lost all ability to evaluate risk and was unwilling to consider ANY issues outside of Covid when it came to how we were going to behave as a society. Like I know people personally who stopped talking to me when I decided to stop masking in most outdoor settings after it became clear that outdoor transmission was rare, and when it happened required prolonged exposure. I literally had a neighbor who screamed at me for not masking my 3 year old on a sidewalk. I also have Trumpy family members who thought wearing a mask meant you were a fascist. Navigating between those two groups SUCKS.[/b]

And I think that's par to the Covid shift. It's not really even about Covid. It's about how it's just become impossible to function in a world where people have adopted such extreme viewpoints on absolutely everything. It's exhausting. I think a lot of people who talk about the "overreaction" to Covid are really talking about this polarization, and the heightened emotions around everything and not necessarily saying "oh Covid was a blip, who cares."[/quote]

Amen. The bolded resonates with me so much. If you weren't predisposed to favor one group over the other, you found yourself either cutting off contact with the most extreme viewpoints or viewing all interactions with uncertainty.

What strikes me most now is that the two extremes have come together to deny the lasting impact of COVID in equally disingenuous ways. The "COVID is nothing" people claim that everyone overreacted and that they were out living their lives freely within months. At the same time, they are furious about prolonged and what they believe were unwarranted and burdensome COVID restrictions. However, if you took COVID seriously, followed any of these unreasonable public health directives, and struggled due to the restrictions, any negative consequences were a matter of individual choice and totally your fault.

On the other hand, there are the "avoid disease above all else people" who made demands for COVID sacrifices a matter of public health and social justice. These people are so convinced that unending sacrifice was necessary and right that they refuse to acknowledge the harms caused by the mitigation measures. "Public health" does not, in their view, include acknowledgment of social,  educational, or other needs. The consequences of COVID sacrifice for the greater good are the responsibility of each individual and wouldn't exist if individuals had done a better job adapting, parenting, or whatever. Again, it's all individual choice.

It's like both sides are saying that COVID and COVID policies were of paramount importance while simultaneously denying the ongoing effects of the policies and blaming individuals if they struggled.[/quote]

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