No, it's not normal and it's not natural. I remember being treated like this by the same people I heard spread fear and misinformation about COVID throughout the year before I got COVID. It's incredibly dehumanizing, isolating, and fractures any sense of community. My relationship with those people will never be the same.
It seems to me that one essential function of high school is being served here: to teach that in the realm of human behavior, “horrible” and “normal” are not mutually exclusive.
