There were saner voices: there are level heads now saying, “But we don’t know yet, so caution is advised.” They’re almost always ignored… and somehow the narrative becomes, “Nobody imagined this.” Yeah, no, some people did. You just ignored them.

It’s always been this way. (There have always been people who argued for ideas that the vast majority now pretend nobody ever imagined before last year.

(My wife observed frustratedly how you can hear the racist assholes of today lying to their grandkids, “*Everyone* thought that way in 2020!”)