Sorry about your neighbor Regen. My father had recovered from his bout with covid, though he gave us quite a scare for a while. He's still refusing to stop praying in the mosque, though he now uses more precautions.
on the positive side, Thursday is market day for our cluster of villages, and for the last 8 months I've been almost the only one out of thousands with a mask. Made me only go once a month instead of my weekly trip. Today though, I've seen almost half the people there with masks, so that's an improvement. I also started seeing people walking in the village with masks, whereas before anyone wearing a mask was met with silent ridicule. Sometimes jokes would be said, and a little laugh and (No Corona here, leave it to God, you won't get it). Ignorance of both science and religion gets on my nerves. They claim to leave it to God, when it says in Quran "Take your precautions then trust in God" (I paraphrased so that you can understand).
I was never on the receiving end of such ridicule though, which is quite weird. They see it as okay for an educated - or city born - man to take precautions, while they almost discourage their families from doing the same.
Sorry about the rant.
anyway, the improvement of people's attitudes was due to a scare campaign, not sure if it was just a rumor or that someone in the government had a hand in it, but they say the most ridiculous things about the new strain of covid, that it shreds your stomach to pieces that you can see in the toilet. And that's the least of the rumors. Lol