"My readers in Europe, can you shed more light on things?"
The sentiment of the population changed drastically in the last months. While initially there was a lot of fear, concern, seriousness, and responsibility, it got replaced by fatigue, sloppyness, conspiracy theories, and hopeful thinking. Put simply, the "Covid isn't that bad, just a little worse than the flu maybe. Also masks don't really work! Muh freedom!"-faction increased in numbers.
The strategic management and policy response from governments changed drastically: While initially it was "better
Out of curiosity I had to look at the FT chart with relative numbers (= seven-day rolling average of new cases (per million), by number of days since 0.1 average daily cases (per million) first recorded):
Linear scale:
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=gbr&areas=eur&areas=deu&areas=ita&areas=esp&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usca&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=ustx&byDate=0&cumulative=0&logScale=0&perMillion=1&values=cases
Log scale:
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=gbr&areas=eur&areas=deu&areas=ita&areas=esp&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usca&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=ustx&byDate=0&cumulative=0&logScale=1&perMillion=1&values=cases
It looks like the next weeks will show where the situation will go. The curve for some countries looks quite bumpy on the log scale.
8Viliam
Yep, I agree with all of this.
The start of coronavirus caught the conspiracy theorists unprepared. "We are not doomed!" is not a good viral message. But they had enough time to design better messages meanwhile.
(Ironically, handling coronavirus in spring too well backfired. I read on Facebook regularly: "so the goverment is trying to convince us that we are in the middle of a pandemic and millions of people have died, but I personally do not know anyone who died or even got seriously sick, and I bet neither do you; how statistically likely is that?")
People are tired. For example, in spring, I used to disinfect everything I brought home from the shop. In summer I stopped doing that. Then in autumn I noticed that I am still not doing that, despite the danger being 10× greater than in spring. (After reflection, I renewed the habit. But it took me some time to notice.) Similarly, having kids stay at home seemed like a simple and reasonable thing in spring. But now it is half year without having a quiet morning at home. For people who have kids in elementary-school age it must be even worse -- you have to babysit them, and technically handle their online lessons, all while working full-time from home -- so I understand the pressure on government to keep the schools open. Essentially, in spring people wanted the government to protect their lives, but in autumn people want a break. It is insane, but it makes sense psychologically.
During summer it seems like things were okay for a while, so people took vacations abroad like crazy. That probably contributed a lot to making things worse.
In Slovakia, in spring there was a popular demand for wearing face masks and lockdowns. People had face masks before it was mandatory, and cities were closing schools before the government required it. Which is how we got the fewest deaths per capita in the entire EU. Now we get each day as many new cases as during the entire April; and more people died in last 7 days than between the
"My readers in Europe, can you shed more light on things?"
- The sentiment of the population changed drastically in the last months. While initially there was a lot of fear, concern, seriousness, and responsibility, it got replaced by fatigue, sloppyness, conspiracy theories, and hopeful thinking. Put simply, the "Covid isn't that bad, just a little worse than the flu maybe. Also masks don't really work! Muh freedom!"-faction increased in numbers.
- The strategic management and policy response from governments changed drastically: While initially it was "better
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