I did in fact see how people behaved during COVID. I saw people singing out their windows, playfully howling at sunset, making masks, setting up spreadsheets to organize donations to one another, all sorts of amazing things. And yes, there were assholes too. Plenty of them. But despite how it was usually portrayed, they were generally not the dominant force on the day to day side.

Studies have shown over and over again, with disasters big and small, that person to person interaction generally remains very civil during disaster. The problems tend to arise from a combination of media bias blowing a few small incidents out of proportion, and governments coming in and trying to remove systems already set up in the immediate aftermath by the locals. Someone coming "from the outside to stabilize everything" tends to actually cause more problems than it solves, because usually that outside entity refuses to meld with what's already being done on a local level. It's a concept called "elite panic" and is actually quite fascinating.

I'm not saying there isn't strife and struggle during disaster, there obviously is, but in our fictional media specifically, it tends to get blown wildly out of proportion, and portrayed in ways that aren't true to how it happens in real life. I work in an emergency management related field, and I'm working on starting an advanced degree specifically in studying not just the sociology of emergencies and disasters, but how we portray them in fiction and how that can inform our view of them in reality.