Kids are now getting booted out of restaurants. City schools might return to virtual learning. Cloth masks aren’t effective anymore so now we need N95s, test are flying off the shelves, and health experts are now debating whether three shots are enough or we should start doling out a fourth. All for a more contagious variant of COVID that basically gives people a cold.
This is what happens when you let all-out paranoia grip a society to the point where people lose all capacity to reason, or calculate risk. Where they start sacrificing their mental health and their children and their economy because politicians have convinced them to be more afraid of the sniffles than of tyranny. It’s happened all throughout history: when fear becomes people’s religion, and the government becomes their god. And it never, ever ends well.