I got a friend.... swears Coronavirus is a "HOAX" because he only knows one person personally that has had it. He's mostly upset that "schools are gonna be going on, and my kids need to go to school!!!".
I reassure him, if they can't physically attend, they've had more than enough time to setup virtual classrooms. I'm assuming teachers may physically show up, but the classes will be done remotely. Kids will still get an education, and they can still be just as social, only almost exclusively online, almost how they prefer it anyway.
He goes on to vent that it's just like the flu..... no worse than the common flu....
I have to remind him that this kicked off mid March... 3.5 months ago. Over 133k Americans have DIED since then, from coronavirus or related complications from having contracted the virus.
Just because we happen to be lucky so far, and have not had direct contact with someone carrying the virus, does not mean it's not out there, waiting, and potentially deadly.
I told him I had another friend that just got over it... his first response was "Well... it didn't kill him did it!!?". I just wanted to facepalm so fucking bad.
Problem is this is one of my best friends, and I understand the frustration with face mask, and places being "social distanced" or temporarily shut down (like beaches, amusement parks, etc etc).
I've told him, that if you want to blame anyone, you gotta start at the top of the lack of an initial response to this threat. It was treated like a joke, and now we're the punchline.
I think Obama had Swine flu and Bush had Sars, but due to competence and accountability in either The Leadership or their admin, threats were treated seriously and mitigated before becoming a serious one. Had that same level of accountability and competence been shown here.... it most likely never would've gotten anywhere near this bad and we'd likely be getting back to "business as usual", instead of continuing to get even worse.
But he don't wanna hear none of that ****.
He's not political, and he not really World News aware. I think he gets his soundbites off clips on Facebook or some ****, so you know what kind of misleading garbage that has to be (I don't use facebook....)
But I'm not sure how get through to him, other than to just give him his space before he starts to compromise the rest of us.
Just thought I'd lay that out here and get it off my chest.