One factor contributing to the polarization seen in the preceding Covid comments, and indeed everywhere, is probably the fact the pandemic has been reported, viewed and treated as a one-size-fits-all situation. We are now months into this nationwide crisis, disaster, whatever you call it. Economy trashed, life everywhere disrupted. And of course, the media (until they turned to the fresher & more entertaining protest stories) feeding the nation dramatic but curiously vague stories of overflowing hospitals with bodies lying in the hallways and stacked in cargo containers, frantic medical personnel heroically improvising ventilators out of duct tape and garden hoses, deaths in unprecedented numbers with exponential increases reportedly inevitable, and endless clips of politicians and experts of all stripes issuing seemingly off-the-cuff decrees that change daily.
And yet - - As an already job-free retiree living in our - what? - call it a suburb of the suburbs area north of LA, it’s difficult to relate to or to reconcile this flood of doom & disaster pouring out of every media source with what our eyes and personal experience tell us. No one I know, including extended family and friends across the country as well as local, has contracted the virus, nor have they mentioned that any of THEIR friends have contracted it. In our three adjoining zip codes, population a bit over 60,000, as of today there have been 100 known cases and, as far as I can determine, zero deaths. I think it’s understandable that the presumably huge nationwide population group that shares our general experience may have a different “take” on what has happened and continues to happen.