Reading this thread from Paul Krugman, I wonder if we aren't underestimating how much Covid broke us psychologically. He basically went driving and if you've been driving in the past 16 months, you probably noticed that people were driving like maniacs. Of course, we all know about the ubiquitous "Karen" videos from your nearest Costco, of someone freaking out over the basic courtesies of wearing a wee paper mask to stop people from dying. Because of a certain overlap with Trumpist Covid denialism, we tended to simply ascribe this to Trump.
As Krugman notes, maybe this reckless driving is tied to the spike in murder rates. It's only a correlation, but it's pretty clear that both traffic fatalities and murder went up, as did any other number of anti-social behaviors.
For many of us, the pandemic was about "In This Together." We saw it as an external threat that could only be slowed and defeated by working together.
However, all you need a fraction of the population - say 10% - to see the pandemic as an opportunity to go full Mad Max to create a measurable increase in reckless behavior.
I don't know if this is true, but we do know that murders and traffic fatalities spiked during Covid. And the reckless driving predates the George Floyd protests.
Complicated events are not caused by One Thing. It does seem clear that Covid was one of the causes of a lot of bad side effects beyond loss of smell.
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