When you're living with the threat every day, and mostly every day you're fine and no one you know typically dies from the threat, maybe for years at a time, it

When you're living with the threat every day, and mostly every day you're fine and no one you know typically dies from the threat, maybe for years at a time, it's pretty normal for humans to dismiss that threat as not worth worrying about. Most people in the west don't take influenza seriously because most people don't get it, and even fewer people know someone who died from it. It's actually to the point where people don't really know what the flu is anymore, and attribute all sorts of other things colloquially to flu; stomach flu, 24-hour flu, etc. Malaria is this foreign, exotic, tropical disease. Malaria is a disease somewhere else, not in mid-Michigan. When all you have to go on is news stories and statistics, and no personal experience, it's easy to go off the deep end without personal experience. People do this with everything. Dangers you live with and manage are fine, foreign threats, un-experienced threats, unknown threats are magnified regardless of the actual threat. People are pretty bad when left to their own devices at relative risk management. I mean how do you think driving in a blizzard sounds to someone who lives in a place where they only see snow on TV and in movies? Compared to a person who lives in a place with 3-5 months of winter driving every year. Or hurricanes for people who live through hurricane season and people who just see it on the weather channel. Drastically different experience certainly color a lot of worldviews on every sort of danger and threat.