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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

I think that what happened with Covid was the big gap between the very strict measures enacted and the perceived risk.

When people think "it's just the flu" it's easy to become defiant.

On the other hand, Ebola has a known fatality rate of 50%+ and so refusing to follow best practices is plain suicidal.

Also events like Partygate in the UK really didn't help, people were already pretty done with the pandemic lifestyle after nearly two years of it on and off including fairly heavy-handed enforcement; the British government then lost all its practical moral authority to impose restrictions when it became clear the very people imposing them had been having massive boozy parties throughout the worst parts of the pandemic. That more than anything was the final nail in the coffin for things like mandatory masking and the 'rule of six' from what I remember.

I wish that public leaders realised just how much their personal moral fibre determines what people in general will and won't tolerate. The public trust they cheerfully destroy in minutes takes decades to rebuild, and I'm genuinely worried that if there's a pandemic with this still in the majority of people's memory they will go 'so you're going to put us under house arrest and have massive parties again? Why should we listen to you?' and it'll be a very difficult question to answer.

Well for Covid it became clear that the risk was indeed quite low if you were not elderly or with an underlying condition while the restrictions were drastic and poorly targeted: Young people suffered a lot even when Covid was really no worse than the flu to them (and most people). Countries like Sweden that didn't go into lockdown also proved that strict restrictions were over the top.

Now, again Ebola is very seriously deadly so it does not make sense to compare people refusing to follow Covid restrictions then to people refusing to follow Ebola best practices now.

>Now, again Ebola is very seriously deadly

Says who? Bunch of 'experts', I'd wager. We've 'ad enough of their rubbish.

Sweden, you mean the country with the highest level of single-occupancy housing, and universal health care?

Maybe they don't perceive the risk to be high, just like during covid the Westerners refusing to social distance or get vaccinated perceived the risk to be low. Let's not pretend that either group is carefully assessing the epidemiology.

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