Well, maybe a matter of pessimism for some; Pascal’s wager for others. I’m over half a century old. I’ve been to a lot of restaurants, on a lot of airplanes, to a lot of concerts and events, seen a lot of piles of rocks and mountains and trails, done all sorts of things. Marginal value of yet another meal out? Not much; my food’s going to be better than most restaurants’ anyway, and I already spend a good chunk of each day talking with friends, students, colleagues. Loss from an outdoor concert vs. the phonograph with the middle-aged audiophile headphones? Possibly better with the headphones, fewer mosquitoes and better sound. Significance of brain damage and loss of ability to breathe well? That could make the rest of life exceptionally difficult and poor, and I’ve got plans for that part of my life. Why gamble those when the odds are so poorly defined? We’ll know soon enough how those odds sort.
If I were 18, it’d be a much tougher decision set and a different definition of “soon enough”, but I suspect I’d still land on the side of “avoid stunting longterm prospects by some unknown but potentially significant amount.” I did after all wear seatbelts and do my preflight checks carefully, and took more risks than most here likely did, but usually managed them pretty carefully. Even Bond’s a careful fellow, that’s how he stays alive.
Societally, we’re obviously just not thinking at all, which isn’t unusual. But consider the costs of the longterm disability weight. Take even @Twoin18’s example of “barely touched by covid”, 1 in 2000 hospitalized. Suppose there are 20 who’re miserably ill but not hospitalizably ill for every hospitalized person. That’s 800 people in their county each month. Of those, given a viral variant that’s been less aggressive, 200-400 can be expected to have longterm symptoms. So in a year, if the 20:1 ratio’s anywhere near right, and the longterm consequences (those wt longterm studies are coming in pretty strongly now, btw, with large n) you’re adding thousands of such cases to your county, with unknown longterm consequences. Do you have services for them all? What might they even cost? How might they change the landscape, particularly in places already stunted by the last 40 years’ economics and the end of the American century?
If the longterm reports are even close to accurate, and if delta and future variants have anything like the effects of wt, then I hardly know how to think about this tsunami of disability and its ramifications. Just driving, consider driving. You’ve got mild brain fog, you’re not counted disabled, there’d be nothing for you if there were, and nobody’s taken your license away. Now imagine millions of such licensed drivers prone to episodes of brain fog. Now imagine they’re also on medications for other conditions that further affect ability to pay sharp attention to the road, and that they can’t work like they used to, so they’ve got a lot of deferred automotive maintenance. Certainly they’re not buying self-driving cars, can’t afford them. What does your highway look like now? Make the intersection with other major shifts going on: climate change and its population movements and life changes, the nearness to autocracy as things spiral out of control and people seek certainty, the unabsorbed social reckonings with incredibly fast population growth, global youthquake, the fact that we’re only about 15 years into even rich people’s being able to see lots of other people’s realities at once all over, and in America the end of whiteness as the air we breathe. A great big wodge of new disability on top of that – that’s quite a thing to absorb. But unless it’s imagined it can’t be planned for, or even made ready for, emotionally, cognitively.
In other words, imagining such scenarios is no more pessimistic than will-making is. We know long-haulers and people with milder long-term symptoms exist, we don’t know how long the effects will last, we don’t know how many more will join them. So: imagine, play it out, imagine the new realities, the costs. And plan.