@AlexisCarringtonColbyDexter
Those of you who aren't concerned about the individual risk to your health (which I understand, the odds are favourable for me too) - do you not worry at all about the risk to the functioning of society if case numbers go up again
Of course, but me worrying about it isnt going to change a damn thing is it? I could worry all night and all day, never sleep at night and stress myself to the point of a nervous breakdown and thats not going to stop anything bad happening or stop covid in its tracks. There seems to be a lot of cognitive dysfunction on this thread that assumes that worrying about something will prevent it. It wont- since when did worry ever stop anything bad from happening?. In fact, stress and worry lower your immune system, so worrying about covid will ironically make you more vulnerable to it.
If you are following guidelines, worry and fear will only serve to make your life worse, increase your vulnerability to illness and generally drag you down into a hopeless spiral. Worry doesnt add a single second to your life, but it will cause you deep unhappiness and waste the life you actually have now. Excessive worry isnt protective, its highly damaging.
It's not that I think people should be sitting around feeling anxious and worrying about it as some kind of hobby, but I am surprised it's not even on most people's radar!
You've only got to look at most of of the replies here - people are giving very personal reasons as to why they're worried or not and barely even mentioning the risks to society if infection rates start going up again, as if that's somehow not going to happen, or won't affect them.
It's like if I was to say I'm completely chilled about walking over a narrow footbridge over a ravine. I might be in normal times, but it would be a different story if hundreds of people were going to be trying to cross it at once. Collectively we have to manage the situation of hundreds of people potentially trying to cross the covid footbridge at once, because they're all individually relaxed about narrow footbridges, but they haven't realised what might happen if they all try to do it at once.
Covid is like that because it's new - it's not trickling along in the background like lots of other existing diseases at low levels, where however careless people are only a manageable number will still get it. Covid still has the potential for thousands, even millions of infections to happen at the same time, and the consequences of that will be dire for all of us regardless of how safe we are individually from the actual illness. That's routine medical treatment stopped again, local lockdowns, businesses failing, school or year group closures...
That risk hasn't gone away, so whenever there's a thread like this where mostly people only talk about their individual risks and don't acknowledge that bigger collective risk, it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence that people really will be careful to follow the guidelines and try hard not to catch or spread the virus.