A collaborative study led by the University of Otago has shown that COVID-19 containment and elimination efforts have become moralised. As a result, people are more likely to accept collateral damage from these efforts, such as social shaming, lost lives and illnesses, and police abuse of power. This moralisation was so strong that people reacted negatively even when COVID-19 restrictions were merely questioned.
Published in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the study, Moralization of COVID-19 Health Response: Asymmetry in Tolerance for Human Costs, examined how likely people were to overlook the harmful by-products of the elimination response, compared to similar actions unrelated to COVID-19 (e.g., reducing road deaths) or those addressing the economic impact of COVID-19.

It should come as no surprise that a recent study produced by a team of three researchers at three different universities confirms this exact problem. Personally, I would just say that people have lost their minds when it comes to Covid-19 and are not thinking rationally. A press release from the University of Otago in New Zealand puts it more eloquently,

Lockdown sceptics have made all kinds of important, well-reasoned, fact-based arguments against the lockdowns and other restrictions that have been imposed upon us. The problem of ‘deaths with’ COVID-19; the many issues with the accuracy of PCR tests; the inflation of the IFR; the comparisons to other diseases; the excess death charts; the fact that the NHS is always nearly overwhelmed every year. None of it has cut through, because most people just don’t respond to fact-based argument. They respond to what they consider to be the moral truth. More importantly, they really don’t respond to fact-based argument if that would mean owning up to being immoral and abnormal. If in order to change your mind you have to become a pariah, then human psychology 101 provides a quick answer: you won’t change your mind.