“ Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational”

Lol. People fear flying and not driving exactly because we’re irrational, not because we’re rational. People oppose lower speed limits for entirely emotional reasons - if we could understand how risky driving is we would fear it like so many of us fear flying, but we’ve learned to suspend our fear through normalization and technology (try driving 80mph in a motorcycle instead of a noise cancelled suv cab) I suspect covid will be fully normalized very soon. It’ll still kill people every year, but (largely due to vaccines) it’ll be small enough numbers that it’ll just fade into the background like all the car accidents that kill people every day.

Covid became a critical political tool in an election year in the US. In doing so, it ceased to be simply a pandemic and instead became whatever it needed to play its part in idpol. The cost benefit analysis not only ends up being an analysis of the harm and benefits of Covid policy, but also of letting "the other guy" win.

It’s worth putting the discussion of “at what cost” in the open.

The cost-benefit analysis for forcing vaccinations and enforcing masking would also seem to follow. Teachers by and large don’t want their asymptomatic students to infect them, and thereby induce them to infect their elders, church members, etc, so moving on-line was completely rational to them for their own preservation.

We can usually see a car coming, and drive more or less safely. Covid’s a wild one in that you can’t see it coming, maybe you only get a little sick, maybe you get so sick you feel like you get hit by a car, and maybe you die. It’s confounding because it doesn’t fit the tidy buckets we prefer. And you can get it without leaving the house if other people come in. Different kind of risk than driving or crossing the street.

We also simply have higher expectations of health now. Spanish flu ripped through in an era where people on average expected a lot less health and longevity. Our valuation criteria have changed immensely in 100 years.