I went to a local department store the other day. I was amazed that over half of the patrons were maskless, many of which were children. I asked myself, “What do they know that I don’t?”
Since early March, when it was becoming obvious that we had a problem with a virus, I started reading up on what I could find about viruses and pandemics. This interest was based partly on curiosity, but also in the belief that it, the pandemic, was real. I read about the Flu Pandemic of 1918 that killed over 650,000 in the U.S. alone. It was explained that those cities that tended to downplay the value of “sheltering in place,” and “social distancing,” and how the citizens of those cities paid the price of higher percentages of flu deaths. Finally, and most importantly I discovered that what we are dealing with now, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the culprit that causes the COVID-19 disease, isn’t anything like the flu, except both the flu and COVID-19 attack the respiratory system. See Comparing COVID-19 to flu.
What has brought a recognizable percentage of the U.S. population to the point of ignoring learned professionals like doctors, various forms of scientists, particularly virologists?