One thing I get from these stories is that so many people really don't stop and consider the real risks of stuff. You see it in driving, attitudes to healthcare, vaccinations, general risk-taking behaviours, and there is a common mentality of "Ach, I'll be fiiiiiine!". And then, when the car's upside-down in the ditch, or that vault over the fence results in a broken neck/leg/arm, there's an attitude of total surprise at how that could possibly have happened.
I think it's a societal thing - we've done a bloody good job of making the place safer, we haven't had a conscript war in over half a century, antibiotics and vaccination have made once-serious diseases ('flu, measles, scarlet fever, diptheria, smallpox) a rarity, and we've all adjusted our expectations accordingly. Even the lifestyle stuff isn't as bad any more - when I was younger, someone having a heart attack or stroke invariably had a very significant impact on their life prospects, or at the very least the quality of it: now (some) people have heart attacks and go on to run marathons, etc.
So something like Covid comes along, and people's risk calculation, based as it is on all the threats we've successfully protected against, is in a lot of cases wildly amiss. Then they get sick, and only then realise that, actually, life isn't nearly as benign and safe as they'd complacently assumed; that things won't just magically be OK And that is sad, although it's really just an emergent property of the illusion of safety we've carefully constructed around ourselves.
