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This is one problem with trusting our rationality: The choice we make now, before we catch the virus, may not be the choice we will wish we had made once we get sick. Then there’s the stubborn fact that individual decisions have collective consequences. It may indeed be the case that a healthy 19-year-old American has little to fear from the coronavirus. But his immunosuppressed grandfather has much to fear from him. Whether it is a more severe imposition on liberty to ask someone to get vaccinated or regularly tested than to ask all immunosuppressed people in the country to effectively shelter in place for the rest of their lives is a collective question that demands a collective answer.

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In Anaheim, Disneyland worker Judy Hart, 62, says she’ll never get the COVID-19 vaccine because it’s “experimental.”

What about masks? Hart wears one while working retail sales at the most magical place on earth, but nowhere else. “It’s against our freedoms,” she explains. “And I’m not some religious weirdo who thinks it’s the mark of the beast.”

After more than 18 months of a pandemic, with 1 of every 545 Americans already killed by COVID-19, a substantial chunk of the population continues to assert their own individual liberties over the common good.

This great divide — spilling into workplaces, schools, supermarkets and voting booths — has split the nation at a historic juncture when partisan factionalism and social media already are achieving similar ends.

It is a phenomenon that perplexes sociologists, legal scholars, public health experts and philosophers, causing them to wonder:

At what point should individual rights yield to the public interest? If coronavirus kills 1 in 100, will that be enough to change some minds? Or 1 in 10?

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“It’s against our freedoms,”