XFool wrote:Lootman wrote:
I have no skin in this game, so no special interest, vested or otherwise. I am just curious about those who prefer fear to facts.
A mis-description. "facts" are not eternal verities, written down on stone tablets at the beginning of history, known to all and unchanged down through all eternity.
Sure the facts might change. But right now there is no indication that they will do.
What won't change is that some people and entities have reasons to amplify the stories around Covid. Clearly the media likes to sensationalise any story: "Omicron gives you sniffles" is not going to sell many papers but "Omicron crisis threatens to break the NHS" does.
Then there are businesses and entities who have, from the start, been using Covid as a pretext to do what they wanted to do anyway, e.g. my bank that has made it more difficult for me to do in-person banking at my local branch. Doctors have been criticised for seeking to avoid in-person appointments with patients and doing phone appointments instead. And so on.
Then there are some people who are just natural worriers or are hypochondriacs. Even within the hopefully more informed Lemon community, you can see quite a range of attitudes towards Covid, from sanguine to scared.
The point being that people and entities have reasons to believe what they believe about Covid, even though they are all presented with the same facts at any point in time. In some cases there is an explicit agenda. In other cases it is merely a reflection of the individual's approach towards risk. And you can see this starkly in the different approach from England and from the principalities regarding lockdowns right now, and between different countries from the very start.