The pandemic is one of those scenarios that challenges the soul of a nation like the US.
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.
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.