What is this about? Why do so few people with COVID-19 symptoms isolate when push comes to shove? My guess is that when you’re in that situation, shoving comes very hard, and the other 82% feel they have no choice – work or you end up jobless; work, or your children starve. These values have been built into our whole way of being for generations now. We need the profit motive (the ‘feed my children’ motive) to make people want to work. But COVID is one of the profit motive’s spectacular failures. It can’t stop people going in to work when even when their illness puts other people at risk – quite the reverse. This philosophy also (it seems to me) misunderstands big parts of what actually motivates people, particularly in the undervalued ‘caring professions’.
Anyway, I wouldn’t expect the hog-whimpering plutocrats who run this country to be any less ignorant of this stuff than I am.