Competent leadership, before entering the entirety of humanity into an intractable dilemma would have considered that possibility.

I don’t know if people are going to be permanently scared of Covid. People are already fed up with being stuck inside with their immediate family. I only know one person who tested positive for Covid (he recovered) but everyone I know has fudged social distancing guidelines in some way. I go play horseshoes with a neighbor a couple times a week. My wife goes on walks with a friend. We’re not always masked and 6 ft apart.

We also have no cases to speak of in our entire county and only 1 death. The virus isn’t here, or maybe it already was here. My entire friend group was hit by some kind of nasty respiratory illness in late January/early February. We already know the virus was out and about by mid December at the latest.

If you’ve somehow managed to navigate your world with the diligence of a surgeon for the past 2+ months, then congratulations I guess. But has your spouse? What about your kids?

I’m hopeful that our frayed obedience to official dictates continue to fray, especially when people come to the same conclusions as BJ here: we need to work to live. We need to work to eat. We need to risk a 0.5% death rate for some person in our lives in order to feed the other 99%.

Elon Musk had a pretty succinct take on this in a recent Joe Rogan appearance. He said something like, “If you don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff.”

Monetarists might have deluded themselves into thinking otherwise, but the rest of us should remember that scarcity exists, and the wolf might not be at the door but it’s going to get there eventually if we don’t break out of this fear-tension-pain complex we let our leaders put us into.