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Notes -
Biden: Pandemic is over
Of course, for all important purposes, pandemic has been over in most of the Western world for most of this year - ie. sure, there's a disease going around, but the "pandemic mentality" is gone, and so have at least the most visible and onerous restrictions - but this sort of a declaration, offhand and qualified as it is, seems like a point in the general development.
It's already evident in social media that COVID doomers - the ones who would still want to mask up, keep up restrictions etc. - are angry and frustrated, as they've been for months, but I also wonder how the sort of "reverse doomers" who declared a year ago that Western world is never going to declare the pandemic over and give up restrictions, either out of stupidity or out of a malignant conspiracy, are interpreting it.
Honestly it's shocking how sticky some of this stuff is, even if the vast majority of people have just moved on with their lives.
Got asked to take a RAT test to attend a 29th birthday celebration in which nobody is immunocompromised or over 30. Some people just seem to want to live in COVID zero mode forever.
High status respected people have to lead and these people will follow. Once the avocado toast people can be sure that being unworried about covid doesn't mean you're a Nazi or Qanon or anti-science guy, they will go along. At this point some are still very afraid of being seen as part of that "misinfo" cluster if they aren't worried about covid enough, the cluster that includes things like climate change denial, Russia stuff, etc. But once it's announced that The Science now actually says XYZ, they will accept it too. They are just taking a bit longer, like that Japanese soldier on that island who "fought" WWII even decades after it ended.
But high status respected people have led. Both implicitly - how often do you see masks worn by people on the telly? - and explicitly, like Biden did just here, or numerous "pandemic influencers" have done in recent months.
I've seen some people lump all mask-wearers, Covid-doomers etc. to some "sheeple" category of people who just do what they're told and follow trends, but the trend-following normies have actually ditched the masks and social distancing a long time ago. This remnant really consists of true believers who don't follow the trends and often actually adopted Covid distancing measures before they became the social norm; in many ways they at least can consider themselves equally headstrong and dissident types as the Covid skeptics do, or have done.
Of course "normie"/"contrarian" is a sliding scale, many of them will probably eventually succumb to the social pressure, just as many Covid skeptics did - but still, it's different than described here.
Yeah, but are there many such people who keep at it out of contrarianism? There have always been some germaphobes and neurotics and hypochondriacs etc.
But yes, I agree that most people have moved on. It was first Ukraine but by now it seems to be climate/sustainability (Greta style) again, flight shaming etc. Also tied to the energy crisis in Europe. There's less bandwidth available for boring old stuff like covid with these new things coming up.
Contrarianism is probably the wrong term here, I just used it because I couldn't think of anything better on the spot.
The "zero-covidianism" is more like a honestly held ideology at this point. It's a new ideology, to be sure, still in the process of formation, but every ideology must be new at one point. We'll see how it sticks - the main point was still that it's not just normie "go-with-the-flow" thinking, these people are not going with the flow at the moment, and most likely never conceptualized it like the "flow" was what they were a part of.
For instance, local hardcore zero-covidists have, throughout the crisis, maintained that the Finnish government never truly wanted to fight Covid, that it was willing to let kids get long Covid (since Finland only had school closured for two months in 2020 and never after that), that the local health authorities are in thrall to Great Barrington Declaration, want to copy Sweden, believe in "herd immunity" etc. From that perspective, it would be easy to believe that it's just you and your pals trying your damndest to combat the mainstream ideology, which is "Feh, we'll only combat Covid when we are absolutely pushed to do so and want to return to "normality" as fast as possible", and the anti-maskers and anti-lockdowners are just a particularly loud and unpleasant version of this mainstream ideology.
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I don't think so. I think this is just the way public health people are. The entire culture of public health is about pushing for marginal improvements in expected longevity across large populations, which often means recommending things that look pretty silly on an individualized basis (e.g. the CDC admonishing against over easy eggs). It seems to me that this culture of pursuing some value of "health" at the population level is chosen by people that have a particularly neurotic bent to begin with and that the localized cultures at these institutions continues to push the internal logic of it, to the point where quite a few people in the profession really will refuse rare beef or feel that sunscreen is a strict requirement for going outside.
Of course, it doesn't escape my notice that quite a few people in the industry are obviously unhealthy at a glance, but the cognitive dissonance of that never seems to bother people all that much.
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