Each time I look at the infection graph for Illinois, I’m still impressed how we’ve reacted each time. Slight bump in the road (March 2020), lock everything down, nobody’s out doing anything. July/august 2020, more panic again but hardly a change in how things were going here. People out and worked, went to the events that were happening. November 2020, major panic, but again not much IRL changed. Just noisy news anchors and hospitals now doing some light triage. 2021, seemingly all waves weren’t noticed and things are “normal” again. Most people in the suburbs and in Chicago wore masks in buildings during all of this. Once I left the city-folk area, people gave two shits and continued life as normal. I’ve never been heckled for wearing a mask, I would get the occasional annoyed look by people, and once was treated like I didn’t exist at a local O’Reilly auto parts store. But what we saw in news reports where grown adults were yelling at workers, getting dragged off planes, I never personally witnessed it. During 2020-2021 I still traveled quite a bit for work, so this isn’t like I never went anywhere. East coast, south East, Midwestern states. The same story, city people adhere to the rules in place, rural people didn’t. It is disturbing how cut and dry it remains.
And it didn’t matter what country either. During ringmeet, the same thing happened, except when we were in grocery stores. That was the big difference. Whereas here if I’m in say, landing Michigan or some other smaller town, didn’t matter where you went, no mask indoors compared with what I saw during ringmeet.