Was this kind of mindset as common when the world irradicated Small Pox and Polio, as it is now?

This kind of thinking has become extremely common across many different topics, ideas and issues.

Improving healthcare, climate change, making better cars/public transport, etc. etc. It's like people have wholesale given up on trying to actually improve anything.

My personal suspicion is it comes from most people struggling under crippling debt, and desperation and no way out in their own life flows over into their broader thinking.

One effect of the virus has been a rise in geographic realism among Australians. Over the last 50 years or so, we have been very gradually coming to think of Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan and Japan as medium size, more-or-less democratic countries like Australia. This year, we've been forced to give up on America and Europe, and we're thinking more seriously about how to live in our part of the world, where many countries have the virus under control. Though not yet seriously enough to learn the languages they speak, or anything like that.

The political leaders at both state and federal levels are banking on an effective/safe vaccine being widely available in the next 12 months.

If that doesn't eventuate, I don't know what the Plan B is.

So it's a race between economic damage and global vaccination.