Edit: I just realized my second question is somewhat US-centric so if you aren't from the US then I apologize, please disregard that comment.
Many of my friends and family have had their closest interaction with the government be taxes & vehicle registration at the DMV - inconveniences, but not much more.
What you list are indeed spectacular failures, but they happened “over there” or “to other people”.
Suddenly, the government is telling _them_ they can’t buy something, they they have to wear a mask, they have to inject something in their body, they can’t go to a concert. Many in my circle have never felt the hand of government so directly.
That’s what’s new and remarkable for a lot of people.
Also maybe you might want to help by explaining to them: it's not the government that was doing those things, it's the virus that was making it so they can’t buy something, they they have to wear a mask, they have to inject something in their body, they can’t go to a concert, etc. The government can only enforce the will of the people, which in this case happens to be fear of an unprecedented attack by a deadly virus. It's totally understandable that this type of global pandemic would be new and remarkable for a lot of people.
The difference between my government's response to the virus and the Swedish government's response was not determined by covid's preferences. Humans made these policies.
>The government can only enforce the will of the people...
The government is enforcing the will of the medical establishment. We didn't get polled on "6' vs 8' social distancing" or "should cloth masks be required or is a bandana acceptable?".
Yes, but my point is that those policies were only made in response to the virus. They were not made for no reason, and of course different groups of people will respond to the virus in different ways.
>The government is enforcing the will of the medical establishment.
I don't understand what the difference here is supposed to be, anyone who seeks medical care in that country could be considered part of the medical establishment, or at least considered as having some kind of investment in the will of that medical establishment.
>We didn't get polled on "6' vs 8' social distancing" or "should cloth masks be required or is a bandana acceptable?".
I'm also confused by this complaint, how often do questions like these show up on a ballot? Usually ballot measures are not this specific.
There is no unified 'will of the people.' I would agree that, in many cases, governments were criminalizing behavior which communities had already curtailed, so to that extent they were following wills of many people. In this case, why not let those same people who chose the actions take the blame or appreciation for their actions, rather than saying it was government?
I've moved about a decent amount in Covid times (after community spread was a fact of life in all those places). While moving throughout places within particular Covid-rule jurisdictions and looking across spans of time, the people I encounter are far stronger predictors of e.g. mask-wearing behavior than recent executive orders. Communities that want to wear masks continued to do so when civil authorities said they weren't necessary and cases were low, and communities that wanted to never wear masks stuck to their plans even when civil authorities ordered masks (with barely enough begrudging, targeted compliance to continue about their days) and cases were spiking.
I don't think this is a useful thing to say, it seems to suggest that a given group of people can't reach consensus, when this is not really the case.
>Communities that want to wear masks continued to do so [...] and communities that wanted to never wear masks stuck to their plans
In my opinion that illustrates why I think any kind of reactions to this are a bit odd. It's very hard to enforce a mask mandate in every possible area in a jurisdiction. So the strategy has to be done by tackling big targets (enforcing the mandates only in densely populated areas, empowering private businesses/organizations to kick people out who endanger other people's safety, stopping people from mass spreading misinformation on social media, etc).
What I've seen is that people who were discreetly throwing parties and were being cautious about the virus didn't have any problems. But it's still risky and they still face penalties if they get get caught, because of course once someone causes a super-spreader event and people end up in the hospital, then it can easily be traced back there, and that's where I'd expect those people to be held liable. So in that sense, yeah you could say they could take blame for their actions after the fact, but that doesn't really help much either if it caused a large number of other people to get sick. We could very directly trace that back to deliberate actions taken by someone knowing full well that it could harm others.
This is even ignoring the massive set of additional laws and regulations you have to comply with you if you own a business.
COVID was the first in most people's experience when their government just went and upended their lives. Starting next week schools are closed. Two weeks from now, you can't go do anything other than work and shop. Stay away from other people or else. That includes babysitters. Oh, and your workplace is ordered to close indefinitely for now.
Whether justified or not, this is an entirely different category from the usual mucking around regulations at the edges, or playing cat and mouse game with white-collar fraudsters (which causes many, if not most, of the business-related law changes).
And sure, this is an emergency. But the point is, most people alive - at least in the West - never experienced a national-level emergency before.
* Seat belt laws
* Can't smoke in bars and restaurants
* Can't smoke within 50 feet of a door
* Unaccompanied children at a park being considered neglect
* Illegal to use a mobile phone while driving
* Mandatory emissions checks to register a car
* Legal mandates for chicken pox vaccine
* Taking your shoes off and going through a body scanner to get on an airplane
* Time of day/time of week restrictions on alcohol sale (existed when I was born, but not where I lived, so new to me when I moved to Texas)
* Restrictions on how much sudafed you can buy
* Restrictions on filling out of state prescriptions forcing me to pick up and mail medication to my wife when she was traveling
* Real ID laws forcing me to make an appointment 9 months in advance and show up with what felt like 18 different types of proof I lived where I said I did in order to be able to vote
* The State of Texas apparently just passed a law saying my block of 6 townhomes now needs to keep minutes and retain paper records and send all communications to each other via registered mail even though we live 20 feet from each other
* I guess it's now illegal to get an abortion here?
Granted, none of these ever happened all at once in response to an emergency. I guess your friends are just lucky to have never lived in a place that experienced an emergency before this? Living through the LA riots wasn't all that pleasant, either. Anyone who has ever lived through a hurricane has not only been told they have to close their business, but they have to abandon their homes completely and leave the city without any guarantee they'll ever be able to return.
Sure, a national level emergency hasn't happened since the 1940s, and almost nobody alive today experienced that, but it is weird to see the divergence in response. As far as I know, shared sacrifice and repurposing of private goods to public purposes in the 1940s had the exact opposite effect. Especially since the measures were far more drastic. We didn't confiscate property and force Chinese Americans into internment camps this time around.
Consider the mistakes of the WHO. Failure to recommend and even decrying early border closures, failure to declare a pandemic until months after evident global spread, and saying masks positively do not work and then dragging their feet for months on the question.
Contrast that to how the WHO reacted to the first SARS, and we can observe a significant deterioration in competence. I could be mistaken, but it doesn't seem that it's just that we are hearing more about incompetence or have short memories.
I can only speculate on the reasons for this. Political polarization leading to affiliation over competence in hiring decisions, more corruption due to cronyism, diversity over competence in hiring decisions, or overly risk-averse decision making due to fear of social media mobs, are candidate explanations.