Good for you, you are in a situation where you are not reliant on a small business and it’s easy to follow advisories.
There’s far more to life and jobs than that.
As for how it’s inevitable - maybe it wasn’t, but look around you. An awful lot of destruction we did for questionable benefits.
And I know that with the next pandemic, far less people are going to listen. To them, the credibility of experts has been permanently damaged.