#2: What makes SARS-COV-2 so unmanageable?

The mild appearance and commonality of respiratory diseases are making it difficult for most people to accept COVID-19 as dangerous.

Humans are superficial first-impression creatures. Most of us cannot comprehend complex problems that we cannot see or sense the dangers that are distant in the future. That's why humans are often fooled by crowd behavior, magic tricks, and bullshiters that smile at them and seem friendly.

The fact is that by nature if a disease doesn't look disgusting, repulsive, or evidently dangerous, humans will treat it casually, nonchalantly, and will have a hard time feeling empathy for patients of those diseases until they see the excruciating pain on their faces. Whenever there's a movie about a pandemic, Hollywood has to make a disease unrealistically gruesome, with those infected bleeding from their eyes or all turning blue (like in Outbreak and Contagion).

In reality, with so many scientific achievements and tools our ancestors could only dream about, the more visually terrifying and deadly the disease is, the more easily it is contained. If SARS-COV-2 caused visible blisters, it would be expressly and without any dissent quarantined and eradicated with no costs spared. Today slow, silent, invisible (non-cinematic) killers are the only real danger.

That's especially the challenge with respiratory diseases: they just don't look ugly enough on the outside (the worse is coughing of the blood). So, for example, governments feel the need to put pictures of lung cancer on cigarette boxes.

Respiratory diseases also have an extremely broad range of symptoms and outcomes: from a simple common and benign cold in an upper respiratory tract to pneumonia, tuberculosis, or SARS, among others, that infect the lower-respiratory tract. That is why people were, even before SARS-COV-2, downplaying the dangers of respiratory diseases, for them, it's all the same. And judging by their experience with a cold or flu, they extrapolate that it must be no big deal.

It's even worse than that. Respiratory diseases often have a tell, symptoms of sneezing and runny or stuffy nose, but SARS-COV-2 does not. It bypasses our first line of defense, so our body doesn't know it is being attacked and skips those symptoms altogether. So it looks even more benign. That makes it more dangerous, not less.

Another problem is that many people don't really believe in the germ theory of disease. They would rather believe some complete nonsense than science. It is not up to them, but God or luck, whether they'll get sick or not. They cannot connect that there was a specific moment in time where their behavior and circumstances caused this microorganism to get inside their or somebody else's body.

Many also believe that getting infected by any virus or bacteria should be supported and not prevented because it builds humans' immunity. They don't bother to differentiate what should be spread or shouldn't, nor do they care what their personal philosophy does to other people. "You are forcing me to wear a mask, so I don't care if I give you the virus," they equate.

Is it then really surprising that half the people are convinced all of this is some kind of elaborate hoax or unimaginable conspiracy? Even many of the rest think there is an overreaction. Therefore most people think that everything that's being done is too much. For me, it is too little, maybe too late.