I was surprised that even in 2020 you have people making up straight lies about covid, while I believed that the wild theories that people had about the plague back in the day (e.g. the one that blamed the jews for it) were born from the fact that these people haven't went to school and were badly educated. But now they can write and relevant parts of the population claim similar things. And COVID is way less deadly than the bubonic plague is. This is a pandemic in easy mode. We would have been in for much worse had it been like the bubonic plague.
One really needs to have some solid critical thinking skills in order to be able to judge the overall reliability and trustworthiness of a book, article, tweet, news episode, etc.
And ideally have some fundamental historical knowledge, basic math, logic, fundamentals of science, etc.
Id argue many Americans are, through no fault of their own, not well-educated.
EDIT:
I cribbed from Noam Chomskys description of what it means to be educated:
https://www.openculture.com/2016/04/noam-chomsky-defines-wha...
'Humboldt, Chomsky says, “argued, I think, very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively, independently, without external controls.” A true education, Chomsky suggests, opens a door to human intellectual freedom and creative autonomy.'
John Kelly: The Great Mortality
An Intimate History of the Black Death
Robert S Gottfried: The Black Death - Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.: Cultures of Plague: Medical Thought At the End of the Renaissance
Philip Ziegler: The Black Death
Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron
there are some fictional works that I enjoyed such as Ken Follet World Without End (should be read after Pillars of the Earth IMO) and it's probably not enough on-topic for what you're asking.