Why do you think people are paranoid? Would they be if they could trust that their fellow citizens were doing their part to mitigate transmission? Would they feel more like a group of people working together to contain a natural disaster, perhaps, if their President and his party didn't subscribe to unscientific blather and insist there was nothing wrong going on at all?
There is a cost to being gaslit like that by people in power. Maybe you don't see it because those people have political positions you agree with.