The real reason is that people are too poor to care about pollution or those dead people, same as anywhere else in the world. Actually, the poorer the country the less people care about the environment or infections.

It's the same with covid too, it's the government which had to force close the economy.

What makes you think "people" have anything to do with deciding whether to do anything about air pollution? As I mentioned in another comment, no individual without billions of dollars behind them can do anything whatsoever about air pollution. Do you really think even, say, middle class Americans could take on the US government, one of the top 10 greenhouse gas polluters in the world?

Maybe I'm just amplifying your point, but you seem to be blaming people for being poor here, when, in fact, people are being kept poor intentionally by capitalism. It's much easier to control people who have no other options, after all.

When people are poor they don't care about the environment, it's a first world problem.

Without capitalism, the government is very unlikely to create wealth (look at China's PRC which had to embrace state capitalism to make money).

China, the largest polluter in the world, is an interesting example: despite their economic success, people's living conditions didn't improve as much and caring about the environment lagged behind the rest of the world.

Until ~2010 China's pollution was a state secret, now that there is a bit more wealth and citizens are more aware we can expect the PRC to do something about it.

Africa is another example of a poor, polluted country.

Ultimately, pollution can be a phase in a growing economy, but if you let technology to run its course, people will eventually move to non polluting tech - because they want to live in a nice world.

If you stop or regulate the economy, or try to come up with a solution, things will take much longer. Nuclear energy is a solution that, without political backslash, could have become our source of clean energy long ago.

The pandemic proved that disrupting the global economy to save lives wasn't an issue at all.

The issue is the right people feeling threatened for their lives. As soon as you can convince rich people that their survival is at risk, and they can't just fly off to another planet or live in their own biosphere somewhere in the Alps, something will be done.

you (and the other commenters) are ignoring the time component, which is quite important here. when quarantine started, most people thought it would only be for a few weeks or a couple months at the most. obviously some people are resisting, but most are willing to make a short-term sacrifice to help slow the spread. telling people they need to permanently reduce their level of consumption to combat climate change is a much bigger ask.

Maybe if instead of a pandemic a catastrophic climate event happened to occur in a sudden period of time, people might get the same impression that it's at most a thing that would last a few weeks or years because "there's no way this would happen to us now." But when more data comes in and it turns out the damage is permanent or long lasting, maybe those people forced to make changes won't end up going back to their original equilibrium. We could not in general forsee the sheer calamity the pandemic has caused in its short timeframe near the beginning. Large and drastic changes would probably have a greater effect on short-term memory than if we're essentially frogs in boiling water, even if the degree of environmental consequences ends up the same.

Because the changes the pandemic caused were drastic by its nature, so much behavior was regulated and put into law (large gatherings illegal, etc.) in such a short time. If it's inevitable that climate change will never occur drastically, how can those restrictions on growth and consumption not continually get pushed back because of lobbyists who see no short-term consequences?

Or given how humans can act, maybe they'd go back to their normal levels of consumption out of spite anyways. It's hard to tell.

Exactly, and truly getting serious about it would basically destroy the global economy in the short term. That's why rich people (and capitalism) don't like it, so they don't do anything about it. There's a big difference between a ~1-2 year disruption and a 5-10 year disruption, which is what I think it would take to make any serious difference vis a vis air pollution.

Just curious, who does like disrupting the global economy on a long term scale?

People who want a sustainable world for their grandchildren to grow up in.