As someone living through this pandemic who happens to study trust, human vigilance & behavior––it's entirely unsurprising that we're unable to maintain adequate COVID19 prevention measures. It's Psych 101 and it is why it's so important to have policies to help keep us in line.

It's the same with other safety-critical things (ex. vehicle automation); we need bounding boxes to keep us safe.

Human vigilance is like a muscle, but instead of getting stronger with use (+ as long as nothing bad happens) it weakens over time.

Therefore, what has been the most disturbing is watching the trust get knocked out of the policies we need to protect us, via their politicization and constant reversal and reimplementation.

Once trust is lost, it's hard to get back.

This dynamic of a loss of trust (and no effort to recover it) plus our innate human inability to maintain vigilance is making us even more vulnerable to negative outcomes in a very dangerous situation.