Do your remember the Ebola panic of 2014? It dominated all news, but especially Fox as a way to cudgel the Obama Administration, because of the scary African virus (get it?). We freaked out over a disease that is very hard to get in a modern, medically advanced society. When Ebola crossed into Nigeria, Nigeria - a country not known for it's well functioning government - stopped it dead in its tracks.
What Ebola has going for it, is it's terrifying. It's a horror show of blood and pain.
Covid kills a largely invisible population: the poor and the elderly. The Post has a nice rundown of the various ways we simply ignore Covid deaths and why. We are having more deaths every day than on 9/11. Yet I guarantee you the very people who have "Never Forget" bumper stickers on their pick-up trucks are the ones who are ignoring public health measures. Planes flying into towers captures the imagination. (The Onion ran a post-9/11 piece about how this all felt like a bad Jerry Bruckheimer movie.) The lonely people dying in hospitals and nursing homes are invisible to us.
We have never been good at assessing risks. This is a human, not an American, condition. Covid seems engineered to exploit all of the flaws in our perception.
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