I get why some people don’t believe it’s a serious threat, at least from a U.S. point of view. I’m not in one of the heaviest-hit areas (as far as we can tell). Online headlines always feature CV-19 prominently, but when you see all the coverage and then something like “50 dead”, it’s kind of natural to think, “Wait, tons more people kick off every day for lots of causes. We’re killing the economy for this?” Also, even if you get the idea of exponential growth, you wonder, “well, shouldn’t it have blown up by now?”
The fact that actions taken at the state and local levels, and belatedly at the federal level, will indeed flatten the curve (with effectiveness TBD), will reinforce this. ”That wasn’t nearly as bad as they said!” So such mitigations will be less effective next time as people blow them off.
I get that this is a really serious problem, but I also get why some people (even those who don’t get their opinions from Fox and the Thumbsucker-in-Chief) don’t believe it. At some gut level, I don’t fully believe it, even though the conscious bits of my brain understand it.