That too many people are even bigger idiots than I thought.

Really. That’s not just the frustration talking. Consider the whole “Okay. it’s over. We’re done” mentality.

Hello? Would anyone dream of saying, “I’m tired of all this gravity shit. I’m jumping off this here cliff and you try to stop me.” And then, half way down, saying, “See? I’m doing fine.”

Nor did people and their governments get to that point after implementing sensible public health measures.

There’s no 100% vaccine mandate (with exceptions for the medically exempt).

There’s no mandate for building ventilation good enough to prevent viral spread.

[Edited to add, forgot a major one, :redface: ] Germicidal UVC lighting everywhere it can reduce viral loads.

There’s no mandate to mask up everywhere that people are within two meters of each other, and triply so when indoors.

No. Instead vaccine and mask mandates are being ditched everywhere by everyone all together. As if there’s some kind of global airborne miasma that destroys the neurons needed to understand anything. As for building ventilation, that never became important enough to mandate so there’s nothing in progress that could be ditched.

Accurate testing of prevalence and genotypes has gone right out. We’re supposed to do our own risk assessments and carry the entire load of infectious disease prevention individually (even though this is a social issue of transmission from person to person). But the tools to understand the risk are removed.

Note: none of those things are life-changing lockdowns. They’re just public health measures that improve our chances if we have to live with this particular virus. Instead of dying with it.

And also note, I’m not arguing any of this because I’m concerned only about vulnerable people. This affects everybody, including us immortals who’ve come through the last two years with minimal losses.

I’m boggled that we can stampede into spreading disease far and wide when we know so little about it.

One thing we do know is that the more sick humans there are to incubate new variants, the more variants we’ll have. The more variants, the more reinfections and the more new and worse forms of the disease. (Until a universal vaccine exists and is mandated for everyone not medically exempt.)

We have no idea, yet, of the long term burden of downstream disease. We’ve only had two years. There’s no way to know the number of excess dementias, heart attacks, strokes, and sudden diabetes ten years from now or twenty years from now. We don’t know whether the chance of long covid goes up with each reinfection. Now that we’ve decided to have millions of human petri dishes, instead of as few as possible, it’s guaranteed that new variants will make reinfections happen.

We’ve taken on a thousand unknown risks of mass disabling events because, the hell with it, masks are icky.

It’s insane.

In the high and far off times, people figured out that cholera and typhoid are spread by open sewers. If they had thought then like we apparently do now they would have said, “Ahh, screw it. Closed sewers cost too much. We’ll just live with it.”

By which, of course, they mean they hope they will live. And somebody else does the dying.