Elected officials instituting restrictions are partly interested in saving lives, partly feeling vulnerable to attacks from the opposition that they are not being heavy-handed enough. Enough citizens wearing a mask badly or breaking distance rules can communicate to politicians that they actually have a mandate to lift restrictions instead of maintaining or strengthening them.

I am in a country where over half the population now opposes lockdown and is more concerned about its side-effects. Some are outright breaking the rules to send a message, but most people fear fines, and so the only means they feel they have to communicate to elected officials and candidates for office is observing the restrictions in a half-hearted way. This en masse failure to respect the rules properly is apparently working -- sources in the party in power claim that the party is dreading being trounced at the polls for this lockdown and trying to back away from it.

I'd like to see a source on that "over half" - it seems like it's very dependant on who you're talking to. I've only met one of my extended friends group who's been against the lockdowns.

Anecdotal: None of my rich friends in tech or academia are against it. A few small tech business owners are.

Blue collars I know are all against it.

"Over half are now opposed" is the claim now made in respected Polish news sources across the ideological spectrum. People were initially somewhat approving of the lockdown last year, but the ruling party made a misstep when they extended it after it was meant to expire.

Do the elected officials in your country not have telephones or mailboxes?

Not really. Not all countries are like the US, UK or Canada where elected representatives claim to welcome letters and phone calls from their constituents. In much of Eastern Europe politicians are perceived as being quite uninterested in hearing from their constituents, and even going out of their way to avoid contact with them after being elected. The average citizen feels pretty powerless, and people resort to other ways of showing their demands and rewarding candidates that try to meet them.

Absolutely and I certainly wore the mask in public.

Parroting that hard lockdown was the only way to manage it while the state next door found smarter ways to manage things without stripping freedom was where I drew the line.

There's only so much incompetence one can take before you just start ignoring direction.

That state next door locked down a large portion of their largest city over Christmas. Their contact tracing is/was certainly better, but lets not pretend they haven't hit limits to it's effectiveness as well.

Well put..