I suspect that the True Believers care less about COVID than they do about having some sort of True Belief and all it entails.
Before COVID, it was raging against Trump. Before that, it was worshiping Obama, and previous to that, hating Bush. It's true that the hysteria has ramped up - the Bush-loathing was relatively low-level and more grounded in actual policy reasons (at least it seemed to me), but the Obama-worship was less so (criticizing his political actions was deemed "racist"), and the Trump rage (and Clinton adoration) was beyond all reasonable levels of sanity (as observed by someone who didn't even like the man). Then Trump went (mostly) away, and the True Believer energy got transferred to COVID hysteria. In each case, though, there were similar elements: an enemy to hate and a politician or "expert" to worship, a set of virtues to be signaled, and an in-group/out-group dynamic: Blue Team, anti-Bush, Obama-loving, Hilary-adoring, Trump loathing, masking-vaxxing hiding-at-home people GOOD, Red team, Bush-voting, Obama-criticizing, Hillary-disliking, Trump-voting, not-buying-covid-hysteria people BAD. Members of Team Blue signaled their membership in the correct belief system in various ways, while railing with increasingly shrill levels of ever-expanding hysteria about the depravity of the caricatured "other".
So....
It wouldn't surprise me if the people in charge can manipulate the narrative to switch off COVID hysteria and switch on something else for the True Believers to obsess over and around which to build a temporary identity. What that will be and how it will work this time, I'm not sure - but I feel like once you see the pattern, it's pretty clear how it works.
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Before COVID, it was raging against Trump. Before that, it was worshiping Obama, and previous to that, hating Bush. It's true that the hysteria has ramped up - the Bush-loathing was relatively low-level and more grounded in actual policy reasons (at least it seemed to me), but the Obama-worship was less so (criticizing his political actions was deemed "racist"), and the Trump rage (and Clinton adoration) was beyond all reasonable levels of sanity (as observed by someone who didn't even like the man). Then Trump went (mostly) away, and the True Believer energy got transferred to COVID hysteria. In each case, though, there were similar elements: an enemy to hate and a politician or "expert" to worship, a set of virtues to be signaled, and an in-group/out-group dynamic: Blue Team, anti-Bush, Obama-loving, Hilary-adoring, Trump loathing, masking-vaxxing hiding-at-home people GOOD, Red team, Bush-voting, Obama-criticizing, Hillary-disliking, Trump-voting, not-buying-covid-hysteria people BAD. Members of Team Blue signaled their membership in the correct belief system in various ways, while railing with increasingly shrill levels of ever-expanding hysteria about the depravity of the caricatured "other".
So....
It wouldn't surprise me if the people in charge can manipulate the narrative to switch off COVID hysteria and switch on something else for the True Believers to obsess over and around which to build a temporary identity. What that will be and how it will work this time, I'm not sure - but I feel like once you see the pattern, it's pretty clear how it works.