Welll… this is valid inasmuch as a certain segment of Americans have the attitude “nobody’s going to tell me to do something inconvenient.” But it’s very true to say that the symptom profile of this disease seems ideally suited to inflaming that sort of attitude.
If I wanted to destroy a society without killing all the people, I’d design a disease just like COVID. Stoke an enormous social division by attacking the poor and medically marginal people, while (mostly) sparing the young and wealthy. Create a disease that doesn’t directly harm most of the workforce, but imposes enormous work-conflicting family care burdens upon them. The most-affected people have cause to be outraged over what’s happening to them, the stubborn, selfish part of society has incentive to dig in their heels and refuse to cede even an inch of privilege, and demand that the other lazy pricks stop whining and get back to their (suddenly essential) jobs, paying the same garbage wage as before.
That’s what we saw with COVID. Early on, the public face of COVID was doctors working 18 hour days until their faces were creased by PPE. The recalcitrant deniers coded them as wealthy virtuous elites, whom they actively resent, while the victims remained mostly invisible, ensconced in quarantined wards dying on ventilators.
Had the early social signs of COVID been dead children stacked up like cordwood in funeral pyres in Seattle and NYC, things would have been different. Perhaps different in a good way (social virtue around public health is a good thing, let’s wear masks), perhaps different in a bad way (permanent martial law under Field Marshal Trump, for the children). But undeniably there would have been a difference.