During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a lot of confusion about what would help mitigate risk and what would not, and when rules seemed arbitrary (e.g. you can go to a tattoo parlor but not get a haircut) it may have caused resentment - and therefore quiet dissent.

A recent survey found that up to 25 percent broke one of the seven rules that were instituted by government and too-eager-epidemiologists and 70 percent of the respondents were women. When they were supposed to quarantine, for example, but did not because their child may have been 'exposed' but was asymptomatic, they didn't deny their child an event and didn't say anything about the potential exposure because they didn't want to get called yelled at (1) - kind of like how almost every poll in 2016 predicted a Hillary Clinton rout because polls are useless in predicting real behavior.

We can only speculate on reasons more women may have broken government mandates. Women generally have more child-care responsibilities and poor women in the early days certainly had less access to testing(2) so perhaps that made it easier to rationalize. Maybe women who know it is their right to choose to give birth to a child also feel like it is their right to choose which other arbitrary government mandates to follow. It was fine to see so many people virtue signaling about how they were staying home to save the planet but not everyone had that kind of job, especially if they were deemed expendable...sorry, "essential."



But non-adherence also went the other way. Some parents got their kids the vaccine before it was approved for their age group. The same wealthy elites who were getting a pediatrician to give their child a "medical" exemption from vaccines in 2019 - gotta prevent that autism in Marin county and San Francisco - were getting their kids to the front of the line when COVID-19 vaccines became available, but for essential personnel first. 

There are no easy solutions for either, the only solution may be time. Sometimes culture just changes, like Democrats becoming pro-vaccine after Republicans flipped and were against them. As government becomes a larger part of our lives, it may be that paying people to stay home becomes more common, and that would certainly make compliance easier.

The best solution would be to get prepared for the next coronavirus pandemic, since we've now had three this century covering six years out of 23, but to prepare for the next one would mean we have to send a whole lot of CDC government union employees into early retirement - and that is not going to happen when Republicans hate careers in government almost as much as they hate George Johnson's "All Boys Aren't Blue." 
 
NOTES:

(1) California has created a lot of casual criminals with its new composting mandate. People are weirdly told to go buy plastic bags and store food waste in them. Then those go into the yard waste bin, which is picked up by emissions belching trucks except twice as often now. The emissions belching trucks are then needing sorted by government employees, then the food waste in the plastic bags is sent 40 miles in larger emissions belching trucks to a composting facility. which composts the food waste using fantastic amounts of energy. Yet there are not enough of those so the government has to spend an additional $5 billion for those, while telling poor children there is no room in the budget for their daycare.

Meanwhile, the state has a $30 billion deficit due to the nation's highest state income tax, highest utility costs, and highest gas taxes causing enough people for an entire Congressional district to flee to other states. For which the government blames COVID-19.

(2) It will be another year or two before we know the true mortality of people who did not go to the doctor because of claims that every hospital was overrun with COVID-19 patients on ventilators.