Yeah, I'm seeing a huge age divide in attitudes as well. Nearly everyone I know in their 20s or 30s is tearing their hair out trying to get their parents to understand just how bad it is. Mine were still planning on going on holiday to Cuba up until a week and a half ago, while I have aunts and uncles in their late-60s and older who are still going out to shop, play golf, visit friends... it's so frustrating. I keep having to run through basic facts about transmission, the trends and evidence from elsewhere, the studies and modelling, and the fact that the UK has been an international outlier for weeks now, before it starts to sink in just how bad things are going to be. Most other countries saw what happened to Italy and put in place measures to flatten the curve more pro-actively; the UK appears to have seen what happened and said, "yeah, we'll have some of that, sounds great". Meanwhile, the mutual aid groups that have sprung up around the country to organise community responses are, from what I've seen, mostly being run by people in their 40s or younger. But overall, I don't really blame any one age group more than another, because while stupidity age-blind, this really is a direct result of how the government response to this has been to leave final choices in individual hands. Not forcing closures, but "urging". Not enforcing curfews, but "suggesting" people don't see their mum on mother's day (and then u-turning yet again and releasing a last-minute plea in the Sunday papers, which, oh yeah, people are going to be going out to go and buy!). I think it's dangerous to buy into the idea that it's specific individuals who are responsible for store shelves being empty, or new infection clusters appearing in certain areas, or people fleeing out the cities to the countryside and overwhelming health services in villages and towns. These are predictable behaviours, and it is an incredible failure of political leadership not to plan accordingly.
Down here in London, there's also a really clear divide by class as well as age. Wealthier areas are quieter, poorer areas are just as busy, largely I assume because for many people WFH/avoiding going out isn't financially possible - but the parks are busier than usual everywhere. There's an outdoor gym near me - nothing fancy, a few pull-up bars and things - but there must have been 30 people using them yesterday, including different personal trainers turning up throughout the day to lead various small workout classes. Large and small groups in close proximity, spotting each other, etc., it's madness. Every time I walk past someone on the pavement with the dog I take a swerve to avoid passing too close, and most people look at me like I'm mental. The kinds of mass changes in behaviour we need to see just haven't happened yet at the right kinds of scale, and people seem to still be trying to redirect their energy towards still doing group activities, just not in the places that are closed. Can't go to the gym? We'll all go to the park instead. Can't go to a restaurant for lunch? Let's have a picnic, or go around a friend's.
Everything I'm hearing and seeing is making me more and more worried, and angry, every day. The actual science of transmission, and the necessary steps to prevent it, isn't getting through, because there's just no coordinated and consistent comms strategy from government and health authorities. We should have been ordering ventilators back in January, not waiting until March to put together some ramshackle cosplay of plowshares-to-swords. Same for increasing supplies of testing kits, masks, gloves, etc., as well as explaining clearly what terms like "herd immunity", "social distancing", "quarantine", etc., mean, over and over again. Explain the different levels of lockdown, and make it really, really fucking simple. Traffic lights, maybe - green is normal, yellow is only take necessary trips outside the home, red is shelter in place (it would need to be more detailed than that, but you get the idea). When you get the severity of the situation across, you don't need to turn your country into a police state because you generate informed consent. All this talk of it being an inherent difference in east vs west culture, a reflection of conformity vs individuality, is wrong - it's the UK, the US, and the Dutch vs East Asia and the rest of the West, and the cultural cues involved here come from the top (France seems to be handling its lockdown fine, without welding people inside like China has!). It's down to recent outbreaks like SARS that wearing face masks is normalised in East Asia, and for why their institutions were more prepared to engage in the kinds of mass public health interventions necessary. By contrast, the NHS and government have conducted three separate pandemic wargame exercises over the last decade, and each of them have found the exact shortages of beds and equipment - and patterns of deaths - as we're seeing, but nothing was done. The Red Cross said this would happen in 2017, and nothing was done. Instead, more cuts. I wish the media would stop being so deferential, stop talking about how "impressive" Rishi Sunak looks, and actually hold the people with the power to do something to account for once. We had four years of Brexit being treated like a party political drama and it made everything a gazillion times worse, and the same thing's happening again here.