[allenu]

I wonder about this, and not in the sense that this person is being extra cautious still. In my case, I moved into my house a few months before the pandemic struck. When I moved in, the couple across the street came by to introduce themselves when I was moving in. We had a short friendly chat and exchanged numbers.

Once the pandemic hit, everyone sort of disappeared, and I hadn't even talked to the neighbors on one side of the house. During that period, I got more introverted and sort of started avoiding social interactions with people, and not because of a fear of catching COVID. I just became more withdrawn since I wasn't socializing in general.

Anyway, after it got safer and more people were getting out, I now felt awkward seeing the people who introduced themselves on that first day since so much time has elapsed without conversation. (That's on me and my social anxiety, though.) I think it'll require me getting over my introversion to chat with them now.

On the other hand, I have been over to a neighbor on one side of my house a couple of times, but that was them going out of their way to include me.

I think what I'm saying is the pandemic created this weird empty period where people who had just moved in to neighborhoods didn't necessarily build connections with their neighbors and now it'll take some effort to bridge those gaps. On top of that, I think there was some social practice that many of us were out of, which made it even more difficult to just chat up strangers, but I feel like for me this is finally starting to go away.