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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?
Yup, I still to this day spot people driving with masks on in their car…alone.
A few people have truly lost it. I’m allergic to discussion about Covid now I’m so sick of it. I’m triple vaxxed but I’m not taking any more jabs. I never got sick with it once, even mildly. People keep talking about getting their 4th doses and I just think their insane now, but I live and let live. It’s their health and they can do what they want
An acquaintance recently emailed a large group of people to say how sorry he was to have exposed them to Covid at a recent sporting event. He had recently been infected despite having received 5 shots, including the Omicron booster. He also said that he wears an N-95 mask any time he leaves the house.
For many people, actually getting Covid was the cure to their paranoia. I hope for him it will be the same.
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