Oh, your society believes, at a deep ethical and philosophical level, in individual freedoms, personal responsibility, and general laissez-faire attitude regarding behaviors that do no harm to others? Okay. Here's an invisible threat that is on average low-probability fatal but with wide error bars and a step-function if enough people decide to ignore it. If enough people take collective actions that are uncomfortable, inconvenient, and in some cases heavily disruptive (possibly resulting in loss of individuals' livelihoods), the odds of dying from it are minimized for everyone (but nonzero). If not enough people do these things, the odds spike up (hard to say by how much). In terms of personal responsibility, you don't know if you're spreading the disease and if someone catches it and dies, we only have probabilities to estimate responsibility regarding who it came from.
Oh, and a handful of the mitigations might also have nonzero risk of harm or death, with some noteworthy error bars on the estimates.
... and all this on top of a population that barely understands what probability is in general, let alone error bars. Most citizens are, in fact, not nearly educated enough to calculate those risks. But they sure want to think they are, because we put personal responsibility for one's health on the person.
It's like the crisis was hand-tuned to be everything Americans hate.
I was in a zoom call with a large number of people I consider educated. They were talking about the California propositions and they didn't want to talk about what they said or to argue for or against, they just wanted to know who supports and opposes which one and if they were on the right team.
COVID is the single worst thing to happen to civil discussion in my lifetime. The virus is obviously a risk. So are the vaccines. Acting any other way is just downright disingenuous.
At the end of the day, any person with a working brain is free to calculate those risks on their own. No persuading, name-calling, or outright rudeness is needed. (Yes, the top 5 comments I'm talking about you)
In times like this, I'm reminded of most historical calamities...in which a small minority stood on one side, another small minority on the other, but the vast majority simply stood in the middle and thought "Please let this end"
Please upvote this if you're just an average person waiting in the middle.