“It’s a disease that hits others, and you are exaggerating the risk to me, to trick me into supporting the policy decision you want.” Seen/heard it before.
Some of us remember when there was a novel deadly infection, that some conservatives even in top leadership would not even mention much… except to point out it mainly hit homosexuals and heroin users. Nice try, liberals who want to teach my children it’s OK to have sex if you use condoms.
In 2020? Nice try, liberals who want to undo the great economic success of Trump by shutting down the economy. In 2021? Nice try, liberals who want to pretend something could have been done better than Trump did! You’re exaggerating the risk and hiding the real source, trying to get me to turn away from Trump!
Dying on a ventilator with no visitors allowed is assumed to be a “first world” way to die. The family does not get to see you visibly turn into a living corpse before their eyes.
Plus frankly, anything short of the dead piling up in their driveways will fail to faze some of them. The average voter has no idea what the normal mortality rate is and the average person alive today in the US has little concept of what are the normal rates of fatal or long-term disabling outcomes of even “regular” diseases (see: Antivaxxing from pre-2020). We’re victims of our own past success.