Coronavirus spreads. But don't panic! (topical thread)

[M.Linoge]

A friend of ours was standing in line as a store and the lady in front of her had a bunch of party paraphernalia so she casually asked the lady if she was having a party.  "No", said the lady.   "We're having a big wedding"  Our friend kinda mentioned, you know, something like - "Ya know, only 10 people are allowed at a gathering."  The lady smiled and said in a light hearted way, "Meh, who ever dies, dies."      

I think a lot of people have the attitude that nothing bad is going to happen to them.  I don't think it's science denying, or hoax thinking going on here.  I think it's the common,  "Oh well, whatever"....."nothing bad is going to happen to me" syndrome.  It's like car accidents or cancer or other awful events, "it happens to other people, not me". I really think this is what is going on.

There's that, but I feel that something else, something weird, is going on here in Massachusetts the past week or so.  I have seen more people out without masks than I have in months.  

Took a walk one town away...bunch of houses with those thin-blue-line, we-support-the-police flags (not a single black lives matter sign--definitely not the way things are in my town) and encountered maybe eight people (in clumps of one and twos) also out walking, none with a mask, and not a single one of them even tried to go towards the other side of the sidewalk when passing me.  In fact, a couple  said "hi" loudly and rather forcefully to me.  Went into a store in that town: cashier was masked, customers were masked, store owner was not.  

Then today I went to a standalone ATM, one of the enclosed ones, a different next town over, and a guy comes out of it, no mask.  He holds the door open for me and practically screams "Hi, how are you today?" basically into my face, right after he's been inside breathing all over the fucking place for a couple of minutes.  

It almost feels like an orchestrated campaign.  And these particular people were all white, from a lady I took to be in her 30s up to people maybe in their 50s-60s.  

I live in Massachusetts; COVID has killed more than 8,000 people in our state, so there is pretty much no one who doesn't know someone affected by the disease, especially in suburbs just a few miles from Boston.      

It has been hot and humid here, but these folks seem to be deliberately and quite aggressively violating the social distancing norms that had been established.

My guess. Toxic optimism or simply laziness. 
Toxic optimism is rather self-explanatory. You assume the  best and go about your day, because it would be a downer to consider the alternative. 
Laziness is even simpler. It takes time and effort to be responsible, to care about other people. A lot of humans simply refuse to change anything about themselves for the sake of the community.