[mywittyname]

> One day we woke up and restrictions are gone. Fear mongering by the media and our government is gone. COVID is old news. Kinda strange, huh?

Maybe in your bubble.

CDC guidance on masks and other preventative measures are data-driven, based on number of cases in the area, ICU utilization, and other metrics. You can see the guidance for your are here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/covid-... Most places are low risk, meaning the guidance is to, "Wear a mask based on your personal preference, informed by your personal level of risk"

> Fear mongering by the media and our government is gone.

COVID-19 is still in the news. YouTube still has a section dedicated to it, it's still a "special coverage" section in Apple News and it's "front page" news on the New York Times. The President is still actively talking about COVID every day, and is pushing people to get their second boosters (that's fear mongering, right?).

Granted, Fox News hasn't published a covid article in a while.

[spookthesunset]

Data driven, maybe. Myopic in focus? Absolutely. And it is that myopic obsession over Covid that took something bad and made it orders of magnitude worse.

[mywittyname]

> And it is that myopic obsession over Covid that took something bad and made it orders of magnitude worse.

A good number of my family and friends are healthcare workers. You get any set of them into a room and all they do is talk about how many people are dead/dying because they didn't get a vaccine.

So if by "myopic obsession" you mean, the myopic obsession with people not getting vaccinated because of some shortsighted views on relative risks you'd be right. ICUs were full of unvaccinated people who got covid, not vaccinated people who didn't.