To me, there are two types of people following this.
First, there are the people who are paying attention to mainstream media outlets -- NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, etc. -- who are pushing this hype train the same way that the Russia, Kavenaugh, and impeachment stories were pushed. It's never ending breaking news, with the latest development always being worse than the last. These are the people citing the things you see on the news -- rare cases (e.g., of a young person dying), anecdotal side effects ("COVID feet"), and the constant moving of the goalposts (i.e., the media flavor of the week).
These people went from flatten the curve to hospital capacity to ventilators to asymptomatic spread to presymptomatic spread to we opened too soon and on and on and on and on. The concern never ends, and the context is never supplied. The bad news never stops, almost like it's on a treadmill that can't be turned off.
Second, there are people who are not paying as close of attention, but look at the macro statistics straight from the sources. They look at the antibody studies, the CDC data, their state data, the studies in Europe, etc. These people generally have accepted the pandemic for what it is and, based on what is actually happening, don't care anymore.
I concede that I fall into this second camp.
A specific example I can think of is COVID-feet. Remember that? No. Because it's not really a thing anymore.
Or what about the multi-immune system failure in kids? Again, not a thing -- it is so "extremely rare" (per University of Michigan) that it's been basically impossible to study on a macro scale.
At this point, you have to be willfully ignorant of the antibody data, of the CDC data, etc. to think our government response has been anything short of a complete overreach and a total disaster. We are on pace for a really bad flu season -- 1957 or 1968 for example -- yet we have triggered widespread panic and an economic collapse.
The harm being done to our kids (and their parents) won't be fully understood for decades. The failure of doing blanket lockdowns instead of concentrating resources on nursing homes -- which is what the data told is in MARCH -- is arguably the greatest public health failure of all time. The economic collapse from this -- the death of small businesses and rise of big box stores and Amazon/Google/whatever -- sickens me.
Most of all, the complete breakdown of separation of powers should terrify everyone. The public health statutes absolutely DO NOT permit what state governments did during COVID. Public health directors only have power to "isolate" and "quarantine," and these terms are very carefully defined, and they DO NOT mean shutting everything down. This was a disastrous government overrreach that set an extremely dangerous precedent.
Perhaps my greatest frustration in all of this is that there was never a debate. You were just presumed to be some right wing nutjob who lacked empathy if you opposed what was going on. This was not just a failure of democracy, but of science. And I cannot say it any better than these Nobel prize winning scientists, who all but weep at how much science failed us during COVID.
https://vimeo.com/433350887/33bbbe4090So, "listen to the experts?" It's not just the folks getting popular on TV. It's the researchers at NYU, Stanford, Harvard, etc. who have been telling us for months that we screwed this up, and royally so. Perhaps we will start listening to them sooner rather than later.