A friend told me about having witnessed in a shopping mall, a person going around and randomly shoving/ pushing down / assaulting old people. It sounds like part of a rash (e.g. Laval bus driver, person running someone down on a sidewalk in Danforth) of loss of self regulation. Is this COVID after effects, mental health issues, or just normal life?
There's a lot going on in the world, but it would be a mistake to pretend like an ever growing pandemic that we know causes brain damage has nothing to do with it. Ever increasing accidental deaths, more and more car accidents, etc. They're all related.
I don't think it's a behavioral issue, like people got used to fewer people on the roads. I can say locally the traffic never changed significantly, not even during the "lockdown" time. It was largely ignored here.
We all know COVID brain fog is a thing, people with long COVID show decreased metabolism in their brains(https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00259-022-06013-2) and unintentional injury deaths are up almost 25%(https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(22)00431-7/fulltext).
@BE supposedly a large part of the population is hybrid/working from home but it seems like traffic has not reflected this (maybe at certain rush hours, and on Fridays) and I think to make things worse, people might have grown an expectation that there shouldn't be a lot of cars on the road, so they're not acting as carefully as they should.