This to me resonates with what happened in France during 2020. Many were complaining about how the government was treating the people "like babies" instead of treating them "like adults". Nothing came up related to the "rich vs poor" strife which, usually, comes up very, very quickly here.

I think this whole crisis shed some light on the communication skills required from the various authorities. I sympathise with people not liking to be treated like kids, I don't either. But then, looking at people's actual behavior [0], it did make me wonder what the actual, correct, communication should have been.

It's clear to me that "the people" is not one homogenous blob made of identical individuals. People will interpret a message differently and will behave differently when faced with the same exact situation. I guess the whole difficulty of this is that the government and various authorities implicated in managing this crisis can't have the message wrapped in different packages, each targeted to a certain group of people.

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[0] I'm thinking of an episode in early March 2020, right before the lockdown, when the message was "let's all try to take measures to prevent the spread, namely let's stop all bunching up". This was a message from the President, broadcast on public TV, at the time one of the most widely viewed ones. Can't remember the day, but it was during the week. The very next Sunday, so less than one week later, people swarmed the parks in Paris with no attempt whatsoever at distancing.

Was everyone out there? Of course not. Was it even a majority? I don't know, probably not. But those same people would then take public transportation with hundreds of thousands of other people to go to work with other people and so on. All when we were concerned about a virus that was easily spreading through air.