https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-how-social-distancing-became-social-justice/

Covid-19 has brought the science of epidemiology into public discourse in ways that not even SARS or Ebola outbreaks did. The merits of hand washing are now unprecedentedly appreciated, and the citizen-science public has an increasingly strong handle on how Covid-19’s contagiousness and lethality influence our prospects.

Our understanding of Covid’s contagiousness is best captured by the public response to expert predictions on how bad the outbreak will become. For example, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch has provided sobering claims for how much of the world’s adult population would eventually become infected with SARS-CoV-2 (initially between 40 and 70 percent, and more recently 20 and 60 percent). For many, these numbers transfigured Covid-19 from something that might be a problem, to a near inevitability. From “this looks scary” to “I might actually get this thing.”