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On a personal level, has anyone else noticed just how much Covid broke people's brains?
I don't mean this in a cruel or offensive way, but the usual way things go is that people simply don't care about the thing that happened a year or two ago. We move on, we change focus, and we find new things to be offended or enraged (or perhaps happy) about.
I know a couple of people who would likely be avid users of r/MasksforAll, and a higher number of people who are perpetually incensed about vaccines and vaccine mandates. Oddly enough lockdowns are a huge thing here (I have never met a single person angry about lockdowns in real life, but here the number of people persistently furious about lockdowns is pretty large), but in my personal life there are still people utterly incensed that other people are no longer taking safety measures - I wear a mask on the train nowadays after A/B testing it in Excel for the better part of a year and finding I was drastically more likely to get a cold when not masking, but not anywhere else.
Ordinarily even the most politically vehement people I know really do shut up about politics, but two of my friends will no longer shut up about Covid. We catch up for a phone call (we live a few thousand kilometres apart each), and it invariably turns back to vaccines or Covid and so on. One of my aunts is frustrated that she can't get people to reliably mask when catching up with her (she's not immunocompromised or anything along those lines, and she's in her late 40s) without asking them beforehand.
I feel like being, well, a normie throughout this has inoculated me to these feelings. I never really got mad at people not wearing masks or taking vaccines (largely because by that point it was pretty clear Covid was far less dangerous than initially thought), except to note that the people who generally didn't mask back when mask mandates were a thing tended to be the sort of people who committed publically antisocial behaviour to begin with (playing loud music on the train, harrassing people for smokes, etc). Likewise, the more worried people seemed similar to me - I was happy to take a RAT test or whatever to see someone if it assuaged their anxiety.
It's not everyone, and the majority of people seem to have returned to normal. I guess this is a culture war issue in general which is why I'm posting here, but I can't help but feel a large number of people will be relitigating Covid for years, whether it's their anger at authoritarian monsters trying to destroy their lives and enforce the injection of experimental biological matter into their veins, or their fury at antisocial plague rats who were unwilling to take even the slightest measure to try and keep people safe.
I'm not trying to judge these people or look down on them, we all have our issues and our pain points. I'm not going to pretend I don't have mine. But it just strikes me as noticeable that there's a substantial chunk of the population now seemingly stuck on Covid issues.
Does this gel with anyone else?
COVID did have one positive lasting effect: masking on public transit. In many East Asian cities, it was normalized/acceptable preceding the pandemic for the purposes of limiting the risk of the flu and the common cold, and I'm glad wearing a mask on crowded subways won't be considered weirdo territory.
As far as broken people and their brains, though, the most significant social COVID risk is on education. Most immediately, students suffered severe learning loss, both for the material they were supposed to learn and the processes needed for learning. We'll see those effects for a lifetime. But the institutional and cultural changes driven by COVID are also significant. COVID laid bare the reality that the institutions responsible for education aren't really interested in education: learning and intellectual development may be good side effects, but they're not the primary goals. And institutions have learned this lesson. If some desired policy results in plummeting test scores, that's to the discredit of the test scores, not the damaging policy. This has been happening for awhile, but COVID tempered that principle. Schools, informed by the experience of COVID, will increasingly discard objective measures of learning and student well-being for the sake of alignment with the faddish ideas of the day. That's the long COVID we need to worry about.
I don't think I agree with your take as far as COVID normalizing masking on public transit. I think that in some places it may have had the opposite effect. Anecdotally, when I would in the past see a person on the train or walking along a city street with a mask on, I barely thought anything of it. To the extent that it stood out, I just assumed that person maybe had a cold and was a little extra conscientious than the average. It didn't seem particularly weird, and it communicated a completely negligible amount of information to me about that person.
But now, after everything, when I see a person in a mask it means something different. It's no longer an empty signal that tells me nothing about the person. Now it communicates to me that the person is weird. That they may be still gripped by fear, that they may be mentally ill, that they may be excessively credulous when it comes to authorities that I consider untrustworthy, or that they may be an extreme partisan of some kind. For some reason they are still not over COVID as a phenomenon.
It's hard to see a random masked individual any other way now, and I don't like that. I don't like that my initial read of someone who is wearing a mask is now "this person is a COVID weirdo that I should avoid", rather than "this is just a slightly more conscientious person than average." For one thing, now I don't even like putting on a mask at times when my own personal level of conscientiousness suggests would be appropriate, due to the perceived symbolic power of the mask. I don't want to look like a weirdo.
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