Please be careful making a (blanket) statement like "people in the USA have a very strong tendency to discard any fact that inconveniences them"

Morally this answer seems valid, but it fails to account for why, (if a general US immorality is to blame), it is that every prior US pandemic hadn't gone quite this badly. The epithet "Bizarro Week" doesn't appear to have wide usage, so it's unclear which bizarre week it refers to.

@GCCampbell, I stand by it. Others made the same generalization. I live here, see it every day. I have literally millions of anecdotal experiences on the road, at the grocery, at work, and on television. It is clearly a generalization, but when speaking of an entire country, everything is a generalization. There have been journalists writing the same thing, with about the same level of evidence. If Americans listened to the science, this would not be an issue. Behavior is caused by beliefs, created by humans to serve the owner in some way. If not for convenience, what's the cause?

@GCCampbell, I edited to restrict the deniers to "a significant portion", rather than "all" Americans. I agree, that's a bit more accurate, as I also see that it's not everyone. After all, I am one of the other portion who live with, and are guided by, facts, whether I like them or not.

@agc, I apologize. I thought the 'Bizarro Week' reference would be obvious. I'm writing for an American audience (again, my apologies). That was the week everyone freaked out and hoarded all the TP and other necessities and broke our fragile Just In Time economy. I touched on what I think is the difference between now and the past: the repeated message that we "deserve" everything. Marketers do not simply tout the benefits of their products, they now also stroke the audience's ego. I am 52 years old, and this trend began sometime in the 80's, but I am only going from memory here.

@gRex, Re "...this trend began sometime in the 80's": Advertisers have been consciously stroking egos since the 1920s, and in practice much earlier, i.e. the industrial revolution, if not earlier.

@gRex I think the "bizarro week" reference was unclear because, at least in my mind, there was no specific one week period that could be singled out as being much more bizarre than any other week. It doesn't help that staying at home most of the time tends to blur the days and weeks together into indistinguishability.

Much of this answer is true, but it doesn't really answer the fact why this issue has become politically partisan in the US (and only there, afaik; there are demos in some other countries, but they don't follow any party lines).

Though this is interesting, I would like to point out ignoring facts that go against one's opinions is one of the key features of human psychology in general, not just in the US. Therefore I am not sure this really explains why this would have this result in the US and not in other places.

This "answer" is a factually incorrect rant. The WHO has been advising against mask wearing for years. I guess that's one of those "inconvenient facts" you must be ignoring.

@JaredSmith Sourced! youtu.be/M4olt47pr_o The WHO (and every expert) was deliberately lying to us in March because they didn't want a run on the mask supply. An epidemiologist actually withheld a scientific paper showing masks work for this very reason.

@JaredSmith How is that relevant? The WHO certainly messed up by discouraging masks, an action which likely cost many thousands of lives, but once it became clear to the public that they were wrong and that masks were important, why did not wearing them become a political issue? Unless you think that the US right is overly devoted to the WHO and refuses to wear masks out of loyalty to their earlier guidance, their colossal F-up doesn't seem relevant to this question

@JaredSmith so when they stopped lying you... conveniently kept believing the previous lie?

Human nature is human nature. Yes it's true that plenty of people in the USA can ignore facts when it is inconvenient or disagrees with their preconceived views; but that is also true about people in the UK, Russia, Antarctica, and the space station, that's basic human nature. You present no reason why the USA would struggle with this more then other nations, and given people everywhere are capable of ignoring facts you didn't answer why this particular ignoring of facts was more politicized in the USA then in similar nations.

@dsollen I think their answer to that is this sentence: "We've been sold convenience relentlessly for decades and have come to expect it as our birthright". I'm not a fan of this answer, but as an American, I have a hard time fully disputing that argument, at least.

Your answer contains complete falsehoods and a huge blast of opinion, and little else. Yes, the CDC did say not to wear masks. marketwatch.com/story/… Later they said leave the good masks for medical staff. Still later they supported mandatory masks of any available kind. Masks have been known to reduce virus transmission for some time. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440799

@divibisan I did see that, but I feel I still have to stand by my statement as people in UK, Canada, and most other first world nations have been being sold the same conveniences, so again I don't see how the USA would be any different then other nations.. Honestly I feel "being sold convenience" is kind of a meaningless phrase to begin with, obviously everyone chooses more convenience options over less convenient ones because that's practically the meaning of convenience, that doesn't magically alter ones ability to apply critical thinking though.