[StanislavPetrov]

>the problem is most people do not have the expertise and/or time it takes; some trust in so called experts is ok to a degree.

I think the issue is that far too many people have blind trust in "experts". It is okay to admit to yourself that you just don't know enough about something to make an informed decision. You can hazard a guess on how likely something is to be true based on the opinions of "experts", but your confidence in that guess should never be very high for something you don't understand. Unfortunately people like to be confident, and are very susceptible to suggestion and social pressure, and therefore routinely place blind trust in a variety of "experts" in every field from medicine to government to finance. Very often these experts are either partly wrong, completely wrong and/or or spreading misinformation/disinformation due to some hidden agenda (political, economic, social). The end result is large masses of people who are very confident about things which are wrong and/or distorted (which ends up being directly reflected in the quality of our elected leaders and society as a whole).

[IIAOPSW]

I think there is a significant fraction of people for whom their system of reasoning about the world fundamentally follows the same design patterns as religion and the best we can hope for is that they "convert to the church of trusting the experts". Covid really exposed the thought process.

Basically, as I surmise was happening in their mind, the distancing / mask guidelines became the sins, anyone who forgot or followed it imperfectly even once was a bad person, anyone who did get it must have sinned (or someone near to them did), and so long as you never sin it won't happen to you. Implicitly anyone who got it did something to deserve it, as there's no such thing as bad things happening to good people randomly.