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The prevalent authority narrative has not told them to do this at least quite for some time, either.
I thought the hug an asian part made the time period of the quote pretty clear. There weren't many other time periods where we went from hugging Chinese people (Trumps china travel ban), to shaming people for buying up PPE (even trained professional don't always wear it properly!), to shaming people for not following strict PPE guidelines.
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But they so loved that time they want to bring it back.
But, again, that's not NPC behavior by the common definition within the spoilered answers. Wanting to bring some specific era specifically clashes with the idea of just unthinkingly going with the flow and always adopting the currently fashionable views (indeed, by that definition most everyone on the right side of the political spectrum would be a NPC...)
I just intended it as a "use the word in a sentence example" way. Not saying it's specific to covid. I do think there are changes to the way information is disseminated in current times that make NPC different from earlier flavors of conformists. It's mostly the mindlessly following beliefs that rapidly change and are often contradictory though.
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That was mostly the True Believer Zero Covidians, not the NPCs. Back in 2021 most Zero Covidians were NPCs, now the NPCs have moved on so you just have the true believers left. As such you'd expect the average behaviour of the group to change.
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