Way worse. The public perception in my community is that the response to covid was hyper-exaggerated. Unless people they knew in real life were dying, they would basically never go through the masking and quarantine again.
As the partner of a critical care nurse during COVID-19, the perception gulf between "everyone" and "frontline medical workers" was mind-boggling vast.
The former didn't see people on ventilators and dying, but yet still had strong opinions about how serious it was or wasn't.
The latter went into work every day and saw the flood of critical patients, then finally went out after lockdown and heard about how it was an imaginary pandemic.
... I wonder why we had so many nurses leave the profession?
How is your view closer to reality?! We saw fucking legions of people flood our ICUs overnight, and those were not all people that 'would have died anyway', far from it. How many deaths do you need before it becomes part of your reality?
For an objective/scientific reasoning behind this, I once read somewhere (no citations handy, sorry) that humans can't really "associate" at a personal level with more than a few hundred people or so at once.
This means that beyond the family, friends, co-workers and other professional relations, and "the village/church" so to speak it actually doesn't matter at the individual level what happens to those outside of that circle.
People are bad at probability, but I think that cuts both ways on the covid issue. You have healthy 20 year olds who still wont leave their house and living depressed lonely lives because of that 1:1,000,000 chance.
My elderly parents wanted to keep seeing people, even if they were exposed. They said their remaining life expectancy was probably 10 years. They weren't going sacrifice a few of those precious years for even a 5% mortality rate.
But "sufficiently-sick people go to the hospital" is always true, surely? You don't get loads more people in hospital unless loads more people are getting sick. A biased sample's informative if you know exactly how it's biased – in fact, it can be more informative. (If you want to study popular music, you look at the charts, not a random sample of tracks uploaded to SoundCloud.)
Or, “these people were going to die anyways”. I know someone whose father died and rather than admit that he exposed his own dad to something that may have killed him, he took this really odd position.
Friends 85 year old mother didn't get the covid vax because as she said I never go anywhere. The loony ex sister in law visited her when she had a 'cold'. A week later my friends mom is found unconscious on the floor with covid. She probably already had the beginnings of dementia but it's a lot worse and she has to live in a nursing home.
That's my definition of better. Masking and unnecessary quarantining was foisted on us, and did nothing to help anyone.
If anything, it highlighted the mental health crisis going on from the lack of actual community due to a lack of family and religious connections that have decimated by no longer being just down the street and now require a 15+ minute drive, thanks to the isolating nature of the car.
And on top of that, thanks to the mobile phone, there's no spontaneous visits from what community is left.
> Masking and unnecessary quarantining was foisted on us, and did nothing to help anyone
This is factually untrue. Lives were saved--excess mortality . But it's fair to debate whether they were worth it. In my opinion, masking made sense. Quarantine did not. (Private places should have had the right to conduct business without masks. Just as private business should have had the right to include or exclude the unvaccinated.)
