[MrRiddle]

Looks like people are so overcompensating antivaxxers that logic went out the window. Everyone is so polarized that I’m losing faith in returning to normal life. And honestly, both sides are appearing to be equally bad, equally engulfed in their own black and white world.

[JPKab]

Most people are pretty calm about it. It's just there's very noisy fringe elements who are dramatically overrepresented online.

It blows my mind how many otherwise smart people think that online comments are remotely representative of the real world. How many times have you seen a prominent online personality see racist/misogynistic comments from a handful of trolls and then claim that "racists are everywhere!"

It's the same with this.

Frankly, the biggest source of derangement is fear that is utterly detached from reality. Gallup's polling has revealed that 40% of self-identified Democrats think that 50% of people who catch COVID require hospitalization. The rest were slightly less wrong, but still far, far higher than the reality. The actual number is between 1-5%. It's the mirror image of immediately after 9/11, when self-identified Republicans dramatically overestimated the terrorism threat.