Half of us don't know a single person infected with Covid

It probably helps explain why people are unwilling to take steps to prevent the spread. It might be easier for them to accept the need for it if they had actually observed a case. Instead, we have a pandemic that infects large numbers of people, and harms a lot of them, but most people are nonetheless able to ignore it.

Figures like "a million dead worldwide" don't really mean anything. Not even "a quarter million dead in the US" actually means much if it's so far removed that you've never seen a single case.

When you reconcile large numbers of people infected with many people being asymptomatic, it's easy to dismiss the whole thing as overblown. That's harder when you see it up close, but a lot of people haven't.