“There’s also the inescapable oddity of these two people choosing to fly days before lockdown hit”
March 17, 2020 is pretty cusp timing-wise for me finding this believable. That was the same week (or possibly the week before) my employer switched its stance from “Everything normal” to “Office closed until further notice.” And that was in Boston. At the time, the public claims were still mostly that any lockdowns were very temporary and often mostly voluntary. It was before most transportation and hospitality businesses were allowing free covid cancellations; it’s possible cancelling would have cost them more than the discounted trip, which at the time wasn’t psychologically ridiculous as a reasoning process.
(Remember also that just a few weeks prior the small subset of people advocating serious responses to covid were being widely mocked in major media venues across the US).
