I was in the suburbs where we didn't really get hit until the second or third wave when vaccines were already rolling out, so I didn't have it that bad.

I think a lot of the disconnect regarding the mask mandates was between urban and suburban/rural populations. The more spaced out people were, the less risk there was, but everywhere was trying to issue blanket policies between urban and rural areas.

Like I get it, people who live in densely populated cities can't understand why anyone wouldn't wear a mask. That makes sense, cause they're used to so many people being crowded together, and they can't imagine living somewhere more sparsely populated.

But some people live in areas where you can go for a walk and never come within twenty feet of another person, so it's a little different for them. Not just because of the social distance, but also the risk of passing someone infected is just generally lower in those areas.

And then there was the whole tail-end of the pandemic, when nearly everyone was already vaccinated, there weren't as many infections and the infections there were weren't as severe, yet so many places kept mask mandates in place even a year or two later.

At some point, a lot of people just wanted to return to normalcy. A year of social distancing has a substantial impact on people's mental health, but nobody was considering that in their cost-benefit analysis. It was always "in an excess of caution." Sometimes an "excess of caution" is just too much caution. At some point, we could have just treated it like the flu.

Society never fully recovered from the pandemic, to be honest. There's a collective trauma that we all just ignore, but it's a lot harder to meet people and make new friends than it was before.