You're not misunderstanding; some people just don't treat it as seriously as they should.

Going on a walk with masks on was never dangerous, and we knew that starting a few weeks into the US pandemic.

I have friends who work at the CDC that I saw regularly during the pandemic (outdoors, distanced, and masked when necessary).

People react differently during crisis time. Even if government fails to address issues, people will hunker down at home much more. So I'd cut people some slack and figure out what works for them.

And some people get so overzealous about “social distancing” to stop the spread of the virus that they forget why they’re doing it in the first place. You don’t have to “socially” distance yourself from everyone to stop the spread of the virus, Corona can’t be transmitted over video chat.

In person interactions are okay too. I hung out with lots of friends who frequently tested and limited their encounters to those who took the same precautions and none of us caught Corona.

> Corona can’t be transmitted over video chat.

I doubt more than a handful actually thought that

Do you think someone is at a serious risk if they physically distance outside while wearing a mask?

I read the parent poster as saying the unwillingness to meet was not pandemic related.

How would one know? I avoided basically all optional gatherings of more than zero people from mid-March 2020 to late April 2021. I didn’t explain that to anyone; I just didn’t do it.

Well, my experiences match the OP's and it was definitely not very related to pandemic considering that people was not even trying to use Zoom or chat. And this includes people who had no job at the time so "I spend already 8 hours a day on video so please give me a break" were not a majority.

Indeed, that is what I did, and that is what I expected of others. No one really asked why, the answer was obvious, and when I asked them, they said they were quarantining in the same way.

I find it hard to empathize with the idea that you had good friends and wouldn’t even send them an occasional “wish we could hang out; miss you” type message. I can understand why someone might think their true friends were revealed.