I have a friend who works as a nurse in Florida. Her hospital is overflowing with COVID cases right now, more than ever before. Patients who are going in for "normal" illnesses, surgeries and emergency care are in stretchers in the hallway because the COVID ward takes up so much of the space that used to be used for regular patients.
It's not unusual that you might not have met anybody who got it. I've only met one or two people who got it. Not everyone gets it. But it doesn't really matter if COVID is relatively rare, or if most people who get it have a relatively easy time of it. What matters is that many hospitals are not equipped to deal with the rapid influx of people who are having a bad case when a town has an outbreak.
That's why it's still a problem. The best thing you can do to help out your community is get vaccinated. Of course, it's your choice whether you want to or not, but if you want to see the end of this thing, then vaccination is a pretty low effort way to help it along.
In most countries vaccination is free. For most people the risks of complications from the vaccine are much lower than the risks of complications from COVID. Most importantly, it will decrease the chance that you personally will be unlucky enough to suffer from a bad enough case that you're taking up a hospital bed, which helps out healthcare workers who are really snowed under right now, plus it helps out people in your community who are sick with other things and would like to get care without being stacked up in a hallway waiting for mostly-preventable COVID cases to be processed.
With regard to the government response... Trust me, i was in China when the outbreak first started. North America ain't got shit on the lockdown there. In China they literally fenced off neighborhoods, went door-to-door testing people daily, you had to show ID just to leave your house, and you were not allowed to visit any other neighborhoods in your own town. Tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people were forcibly tested and quarantined. No way that will ever happen in rich countries in the west. If they didn't do it 18+ months ago when the virus first broke out, they're not going to do it now that the majority of people are vaccinated and we have more knowledge about how to treat and prevent the disease.
What i am worried about - and what we do have evidence of happening - is closed borders. There is little evidence of "martial law" in most western countries, but there is a lot of evidence that fascists and nationalists have preyed on the fears of the masses to keep national borders closed tight, all over the world. So the people who are really being screwed are multinational families, migrant workers, merchant seamen and refugees. And, of course, travelers like us who want to cross a border for fun and profit.
