Covid Fatigue

I read a great article about Covid fatigue - regardless of political nuttiness.

It says that your fear will wear down over time. There are essentially two kinds of fear / response. 

The first type of phobia fear. Like people who freak out about spiders. The best way to resolve that is get the person used to spiders by repeated and controlled exposure (I could not spell inured for the life of me).

The second fear is low level learned fear. Like if you left the iron on once, you will freak out about doing it again. But, after a few times leaving the house with no horrible consequences, you learn to live with it.

Covid has attack both of these types of fear. People freaked out about a pandemic are exposed to Covid variants over and over and are just inured to them. And people with a low level dread / fear are just trained by repeated warnings, that the fear is bullshit.

Even with people taking it seriously, there is a burnout of wearing masks and sitting in a condo or apartment, not seeing anyone else. 

This knowledge doesn't change anything, but it helps me to understand the burnout and people's lagging compliance with experts. And then experts get more persistent and louder and the burnout accelerates, not diminishes. I think we all saw that with Delta - which was real and killed people, so vaccinations increased. And you saw it much less so with Omicron, which causes a sore throat for most vaccinated people.

I admit to both kinds of fear and both kinds of response. I am glad I am in Aruba, not hearing the constant complaints of Faucci and of the idiots that won't vax.

Response based on fear, with hidden consequences, cannot last forever. I assume that is why people that have experienced loss of a loved one take precautions more seriously that those who know "a friend" passed away and those take precautions much more seriously than those poeple who haven't lost anyone.