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Wait, the BBC is pro-caring about COVID now? The people in the UK I follow on social media are pretty annoyed at them for being part of downplaying COVID, similar to how I see people on the left in the US annoyed that US media is downplaying COVID. I guess they're annoying both sides.
The only remaining members of the COVID camp are incredibly alarmist 99th percentile concern types, some of whom have essentially built themselves into a corner like Eric Feigl-Ding.
It happened, it was a hilariously gigantic overreaction and it seems like society's preferred to just forget about the era as opposed to actually delivering any real comeuppance or punishment upon the ones who architected the ridiculous response.
It's hard for me to tell exactly how much of a bubble I'm in with respect to COVID precautions. I see plenty of comments online like yours suggesting the world looks to you just like 2019 except for occasionally encountering posts online to the contrary. I believe you, I'm just trying to understand how that can be.
I understand that I'm in a city where COVID precautions were more popular; masking in public is certainly not a majority here, but I would find it actively surprising to go to the grocery store or get on a bus/train and see no one wearing a mask. Certainly at any larger (i.e. 10+ people) social gathering I'm at, some of them will be wearing masks, but that's my friends group, so even more narrow than my neighborhood/city. (I know many of my friends test regularly (... although free tests may be going away, so that might not continue...), but that's not visible. It's pretty common for weekend-long-type events I attend to request negative tests.)
Trying to cast a wider net, I went looking at rules for recent conventions. PAX East (March 23-26, 2023 in Boston, MA) required masks. Anime Central (May 19-21, 2023 in Chicago, IL) only recommends masks (their publicity photo from a previous iteration on the top of their website shows everyone wearing masks; perhaps from a previous year when they were required? I've generally noticed events wanting to downplay masks use pre-2020 photos); maybe that's part of a trend towards loosening mask requirements at conventions? Of course, "geek conventions" is its own narrow group, and very well may itself be a hot spot for COVID precautions. Maybe my hobbies and the hobbies I'm aware of happen to be outliers in COVID-cautiousness?
Having been a frequent PAX attendee in past I'd definitely say that group is on the fringes of COVID observation/some of the Enforcer chats I've been in have had some of the most hilarious 'this person has not been outside in their life prior to enforcing' reminders and questions.
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Perhaps there are people who are annoyed that the BBC's lies about covid were insufficiently outrageous, but the BBC still lied in support of lockdowns and forced masking.
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