We mentioned the cold-blooded reasoning above: inconvenience and profit. But a sizable chunk of people have the far more innocent perception that they're a main character in a novel and nothing that bad could happen to them personally. PEOPLE might get sick or die-- but not them, or 'their' people.

In general believing things will turn out for the best even when the evidence points in the other direction is called positive bias, a term I learned/researched during the pandemic! It's apparently a kind of bias I don't experience as often as other people, like a lot of non-neurotypical folks.