That isn’t something I would have anticipated, if I had been writing a book about
people dropping dead from a mystery virus: everyone going very rationalist about it.
In my experience, people are very
twitchy about the idea of dropping dead from something. Especially something that’s
new and mysterious and you can’t do much to stop it. That ticks quite a few boxes
on the list of things that makes human beings freak right the heck out.

I definitely expected more fear and fewer people
calmly arguing that it isn’t actually that many
deaths if you compare it to five or ten years worth of influenza, and anyway,
you have to die of something, sooner or later, and who knows, it might not even
be as deadly as they say.

I’m not saying this is wrong, necessarily. It just feels like an inexplicable,
planet-wide rescaling of what makes us hysterical. Because for a long time, it hasn’t
required much to make us hysterical. We’ve been ready to overreact to very slim
threats.

So what’s going on? There are probably a few factors in play—it surely helps that older people
are disproportionately affected, and there are identity politics mixed up now—but
maybe it’s simply that we’ve grown tired of it. Because I do remember us taking
it more seriously in the beginning. But humans recalibrate. You can get used to
anything, I read, in an awesome short story about a man who’s sent to Hell (I forget
the title), so maybe you get used to this, too.