Covid had revealed some inconvenient truths about the West. We’re increasingly fat and old, kept alive by modern medicine and over nutrition (Africa has a much younger, slimmer population and has resisted the pandemic).
Our ignorance of cold viruses has been woeful - colds spread and everybody catches them, but huge numbers are asymptomatic. You can lock down, wear masks, wash your feet, do the hokey cokey, but you’ll just delay the inevitable: everybody will get it. We’ve just never tested people to see how many have this year’s cold or how it spreads and mutates.
We are unable to interpret statistics. We get obsessed with absolute numbers, get fixated on just one number and we deliberately overstate them in the name of drama, sensationalism and fear.
We love to rely on anecdotal evidence if it fits the narrative (“my postman knows someone who ran 2 marathons a week and he died of covid”).
We worship experts, the very people who have a vested interest in their own self aggrandisement, funding and future importance. If you ask a risk expert he’ll find something risky, otherwise what is he for?
However, we don’t like experts if they express opinions that don’t fit the dramatic narrative (children aren’t affected by covid, the average age of those dying with covid is higher that the average life expectancy, we’ve treated covid at the expense of every other disease and condition etc.).
We’ve no idea how many people have had covid because most don’t even know they’ve had it. So we’ve no idea if or when we reached herd immunity.
We are unashamed virtue signallers (I wear a mask ‘cos I’m more caring than you are).
For all our cleverness, we can be pretty stupid.