The whole fucking thing was weird to me. It was made weirder by the fact that I never got sick, and I only knew one person who did, and for them it was no worse than the standard flu. In my neck of the woods, the lockdowns pretty much ended by August of 2020. I played my first pandemic-era live show with my band then—the bass player was the one guy I knew who got notably sick, and that was months prior—and all the patrons were dancing it up together unmasked. We should all be dead or permanently incapacitated with "long COVID" if the worst fearmongering was true.
Watching the news felt more like watching a movie, where it's all fiction that has no true impact on the real world I inhabit.