A lady came up to me while I was waiting for my kids' school bus and asked me if, while I was filming in China years ago, I had been told by anyone that COVID was "going to be executed." She saw me shopping a years ago "looking worried" so thought I may have been told about it.

She ran off before I could ask her what she was on about, but it was clearly a conspiracy theory thing. I'm not mad (I think she may have had a mental illness), but I realised why COVID has been a unifier for the conspiracy theorists, racists, mentally ill, narcissists etc.

Where in the past they may have believed in aliens, the Illuminati, contrails, or antivaxx etc. separately, they're all united on the one issue - a global shift that is so outside ordinary pre-pandemic life that it requires either trust or specific education to understand it.

If you aren't educated specifically in science, medicine, virology, epidemiology etc. then you kind of have to trust those who have been, and if you don't have the capacity to trust then you essentially drop out of reality, because reality has shifted beyond what you understand.