> You make it sound like it's just a political decision, but a main reason why attention fades because the virus just becomes less deadly That's an interesting

> You make it sound like it's just a political decision, but a main reason why attention fades because the virus just becomes less deadly That's an interesting point, right? I don't know that we have so much control over our attention, living in the age we do. Mass media and advertising, the two pillars of a massive propaganda machine (in a sense of building consensus) continue to pump out opinions, which shape our perception of reality. In that sense, our attention to the pandemic did not have a chance to develop organically, but it was rather guided and instrumented by the mechanisms in place. The relatively smaller subset of society that controls them (not in a conspiratorial way, but in a practical "business pays for minutes of airtime / ad impressions" way) gets to decide how we perceive world events. I'd posit (given historical datasets and what we see in wastewater) that the level of infection across communities is roughly comparable to the past few years (why wouldn't it be? nothing's changed after all in our behaviour). It's only in public perception that the pandemic has diminished.