One motivation I haven’t seen brought up in this thread is the concern that lockdown would impact corporate profits (usually referred to as “the economy” as shorthand for trying to pretend concern for the welfare of individual citizens). I feel that a lot of conservatives. not just politicians, feared that serious response to COVID-19 would result in lower profit margins for their corporate overlords, whereas permitting the disease to run its course while conducting business as usual would only kill people, not corporations.
I think this is right. But it’s now morphing into corporations looking at the deaths of individuals as being a problem, in that it’s shrinking their customer base.
And some of those corporations, apparently, have been signaling the politicians they support with donations that the ‘COVID is a hoax’ messaging is not working for them—and that this will be reflected in a cutoff of the donations spigot.
That makes sense. But in the case of FoxNews, there’s also the factor of ‘fear of lawsuits’ (or fear of boycotts) if the FoxNews ‘it’s all a hoax’ message becomes too closely associated with a rising tide of deaths (due to the Delta variant).
So both the right-wing politicians and the right-wing media are now seen to be pivoting away from the ‘hoax’ message—for reasons having to do with money, mostly. (And also the political reason that 'Biden can be blamed, now that he’s been in office long enough.')
Even this would not faze many of them. They’d just bitch that it’s Biden’s fault that they can’t get out of their driveway to get another dozen crispy cremes.
I feel it’s a fundamental mistake to ask any questions about why conservatives think the things they do. They generally don’t arrive at the positions they hold by thinking about the issue. They simply listen to some authority figure tell them what to believe and then they believe it.
So why have conservatives not taken Covid seriously? Because Donald Trump told them not to and they listened to him. The only meaningful question here is why Trump decided to tell his followers that Covid wasn’t a serious problem.
Well, there’s also the extremely meaningful question of why the hell anyone at all would believe whatever Trump told them to believe.
Companies should also look at how it would be disruptive to their business for a large number of their employees to be sick or have to take care of sick family members. Most larger companies have some sort of business continuity plan to be implemented in the event of a natural disaster. Our pandemic response plan, which I never expected to see used, was to send our employees to work remotely to mitigate the risks of getting sick. And because so many daycare/school facilities closed, a lot of our employees had to stay home to watch them.
One commonality between mass shooting and the COVID pandemic seems to be that conservatives have come to a (largely) unspoken agreement among themselves that there is a certain number of deaths that are an acceptable price to pay to let them continue doing what they want to do. Sure, some individual conservatives who end up amongst the group of people who end up actually paying that price might flip, and realize this is a bad idea, but look at the numbers. Despite the large numbers of people killed both by guns and the pandemic, in terms of probabilities, most of us will never be directly affected by them. So the number of conservatives who flip due to their own personal experiences is just a small fraction of the whole conservative population, not nearly enough to significantly affect the overall course of their beliefs.
It would be an interesting academic question to find out what level of death would be needed to flip them from not caring to caring, but running such an experiment would probably be detrimental to society. 
That’s right–in the USA particularly, we’ve never had much of a policy on childcare other than ‘it’s woman’s work’ and that those women had better do it, no matter whether or not they can afford to. (Our economy has evolved to one in which more than one income is needed in order to afford to raise children, leading to obvious problems when schools aren’t doing offering the traditional number of hours of de-facto childcare.)
The way Congressional Republicans are talking about the parts of the infrastructure proposals that deal with childcare and related parts of the economy–with complete disdain and determination that the status quo will remain-- nothing is going to change on that front, either.
Conservatives, including those Congressional Republicans, are very wed to the idea that sickness, and the work of caring for the sick (and the old and minors) is NOT something for which the Government should provide any help to citizens. Such help might interfere with patriarchal prerogatives, for one thing, and might necessitate taxes being levied on those who prefer to live according to the maxim ‘only the little people pay taxes’, for another.
It killed a lot of fat Americans. Oh never mind, they’re fat because there aren’t healthy food options in depressed neighborhoods.
I’m not entirely convinced that xenophobia is the primary cause of being afraid of a disease that has a 50%+ mortality rate.
Some have reasoned upthread that it can’t just be politics because conservatives are still downplaying the threat with Biden in power.
But are they?
Note things like the claim that fauci was responsible for the death of 4 million, the obsession with the Wuhan lab, and talking about how Mexicans are bringing covid.
There very much is a U-turn in progress.
As to why they don’t tell people to vaccinate or mask up (most of them anyway), you just have to remember that rhetoric is all that matters, not governing. They don’t give any thought about the best interests of their constituents.
So, being against masks, even while acknowledging that it’s a deadly disease, is entirely consistent. The message of pro-trump, pro-“freedom” and anti-“whatever the Dems are doing”, is enough.
This ignores the way that conservatives think. Look at it like this, if a world renowned virologist has something to say about, you know, a virus, but what he says contradicts what the dumb orange president said, then any upstanding conservative will make an enemy of the virologist. Forever.
What the dumb conservative politician says about the virus will be defended no matter the cost, and what the actual medical expertise calls for will be shunned. Forever.
Which is to say that the political right does have some kind of consistency in their beliefs. It’s not “certain statements are true and others are false, and if two statements contradict each other only (at most) one of the statements can be true” but “certain people are good and tell the truth, and certain people are evil and tell lies, and if two people contradict each other then only (at most) one of those people can be in the ‘good people’ category”.
This is not an example of taking a disease ‘seriously’. It’s an example of making a lot of noise about a disease, of attacking your political rival over a disease, but not about being serious in regards to handling the disease.
Witness the recent statement from Arizona’s governor along the lines of, “We’re not going to infringe the freedom of our citizens to refuse masking and vaccinations just because Biden and Harris can’t control this pandemic.” 
This.
…and then in the next breath, they will say they don’t want to be part of “Big Pharma’s” profiteering off the pandemic. SMH
Modding:
- He made it clear that he is not against them.
- It is not against the rules for a mod to raise this kind of question.
- It is against the rules to dispute moderation out side of ATMB.
However your objection is so mild that I will overlook it this time, so no warning.
One reason I am seeing for why conservatives, or at least the religious conservatives near me, are dealing with COVID differently from other diseases, is because they do think it is serious. They consider it to be a plague, and the Bible says God will protect them from plagues. If they get righteous enough (by standing up against anything pushed by the evil Libs?) then God will save them from it. They shame their own members who get vaccinated. One person who got vaccinated says her fellow church members consider vaccination to be the Mark of the Beast.
I wonder if they think a fellow church-goer contracting COVID is a sign of moral failings on that person’s part?
I wouldn’t have thought about it on my own but this meme, and some other similar ones, have been floating around for a while now. It brings up an interesting question. Why do people that think god will protect them, think that they’ll be protected simply by having faith. Why can’t that faith say ‘well, god gave me all these tools to protect me, I should use them’.
If your religion is so bad that getting the vaccine is considered the ‘mark of the beast’, I think they’re probably the same people that will consider anything bad that happens to you to be something you brought on yourself because of a moral failing. It gives people a great excuse to pass judgement on others and feel better about themselves in the process.