1% risk of death. Wait, now sub 0.1%, thx vaccine. Meanwhile schools are still in dystopia mode, Universities are nothing like they were when I went, almost every job in my field is gone, shitloads of businesses have permaclosed, etc.
We can't even reverse it now, loads of it is baked in. Remove all legal restrictions and half of the people are still wearing face masks and avoiding socialising 'cus Covid'.
March-May 2020 kind of sort of made sense (I still think we could have just asked people rather than using legal force but whatever). Beyond that, sunk cost after sunk cost and just an increasingly bizarre game of one-upmanship "look, I can make my life worse than yours!".
_This_ is radicalization - believing an ever deepening web of bollocks and as a result drastically changing one's way of interacting with the world. They don't even remember how they used to live and why.
I stand by my statement - it is conservative to accept a slightly increased risk in order to maintain our traditions. It is radical to flip the world on a dime. (The UK Conservative Party is emphatically not conservative by any reasonable definition).
Here in the UK we're nearly there. Our government is considering removing all restrictions sometime in the next 2 months (it may end up being a bit more phased - lot's of people are in favour of continuing to mandate self-isolation when you actually currently have the virus). If you want that where you live then consider advocating for vaccination uptake, because that's what's allowing us to make these changes here without triggering a public health crisis.