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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.
I strongly doubt that. Nancy Pelosi went hugging people in a Chinatown on Feb. 24, Trump called Covid "a hoax" (not really, but) on Feb. 29 or so and that was when "the social norm" started its rapid 180 turn. Check out this reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/worstof/comments/i1x87n/in_which_ramitheasshole_scolds_and_mocks_a_mother/
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