I'm fucking bummed out about it you all, I feel like hardly anybody is masking or shielding or taking real pandemic safety precautions and it's just wild how much the social normalcy needle has moved. Some of these people I really care about and it genuinely doesn't feel like they have bad intentions with it but it is an implicit acquiescence to eugenics and negligence of high risk people, probably due to social pressures, and it just scares the shit out of me to see people go with the flow on that when I know these same people to be generally empathetic, critically thinking, etc. Like I wonder if I'm wrong but when I look up any info about covid cases (hospitalizations still in the thousands in the u.s.) or when I think about long covid impacts... I just don't see any good evidence for dropping precautions.
Even if you think the numbers are dispersed enough that it couldn't affect you in your day-to-day activities, how do you know? You don't know if you could catch an asymptomatic case at the grocery store or something, pass it on to someone else who has an immunocompromised loved one, or anything like that. It's just... not a good gamble, and it's not okay to take other people as collateral in your "personal choice" making. And I know the state has abandoned us and that's a big fucking part of it but I really wish people would get real about that and take realistic measures to mitigate harm rather than, idk, deciding it's fine? FUCK.