If you haven’t heard, let me be the first to tell you: Massachusetts has its first confirmed case of the new coronavirus. Also, as of writing, a student who exhibited cold-like symptoms and who may have been exposed to the virus has been put into quarantine (In an email to the college, Susan Etheredge, the dean of the college and Tara Dumont, the college physician, wrote that “under CDC and DPH guidance, there is no identified risk to the Smith community”). Additionally, another student voluntarily put themselves in quarantine because they believed they were on the same flight as the Boston student who tested positive and had symptoms consistent with the coronavirus while traveling, but after being asymptomatic for 24 hours, they were released. This is not the news section, and I do not have an opinion on this, other than that I am glad that the patients are being treated.
What I do have an opinion about, however, is that feeling you must likely have welling up inside of you, regardless of when you received that news: fear. Fear is a strange thing, seemingly immune to logic. It doesn’t matter that the international community is working together to research, diagnose, and contain outbreaks. It doesn’t matter that Massachusetts officials have stated that the flu is a greater public threat than this new disease. It doesn’t matter that this assessment is backed up by data: According to Worldometer, today, as of writing, Feb. 2, 2020, 891 (oh wait, no, now 892) people died of the seasonal flu, whereas 305 people have died to the coronavirus (2019-nCoV) this year. I point this out not as a criticism of human nature but to point it out as a fact.
I also point out that fear of getting sick is valid. There are a myriad of emotions that are natural to feel in response to this situation. The official Instagram page of UC Berkeley’s Wellness Department lists several:
- Anxiety, worry, panic
- Feeling helpless
- Social withdrawal
- Difficulty concentrating and sleeping
- Hyper-vigilance to your health and body
- Anger
And then one more:
- Xenophobia: fears about those who might be from Asia and guilt about these feelings
One of these things is not like the others. Here’s a hint: It’s the one I sectioned off. Even in seemingly official places, harmful information can lurk. The worst kind of misinformation is not too far off from the truth. Fear of getting sick is valid. Fear of certain groups of people under the assumption that these groups of people might transmit an illness is not valid.
Illness is a great equalizer. Regardless of race, national origin, sexuality, or class, we all get sick. Yes, one is more susceptible to certain diseases depending on where you are in the world (i.e: malaria in tropical climates), and certain parts of your identity can affect your ability to get treated (i.e: not having health insurance, certain conditions being more common in one race so a patient of another race getting misdiagnosed), but because disease is something everyone can relate to, it stands to reason that, in the face of a common threat, that the world community would unite and see each other as kin.
I reiterate that fear is not beholden to logic. However, fear is not immune to information. Our emotional reactions are shaped by how we receive information, and when it comes to information about disease, we are bombarded with information meant to elicit fear: terms unfamiliar to the layperson, images of people in stretchers, cities in shutdown on an unprecedented scale….
When that is the information that is not only given but repeatedly given, fear is natural. But there is a sinister undercurrent to the information being presented about this disease. Consider even the popular name: the Wuhan coronavirus. The disease is somehow Wuhan’s fault, this name says, intentionally or not. The disease is Wuhan’s problem. This phenomenon is not surprising to those who follow the language describing natural disasters. Indeed, like the descriptions of a young black man “looting” a grocery store after Hurricane Katrina versus a white couple “finding” bread, such language is couched in racism.
I say racism, not xenophobia. Fear is valid. Hatred is not. When hatred is medicalized, it becomes OK. More importantly, if a person is “sick” with hatred, then logic dictates that it is the person’s responsibility to “get better,” not the society’s—even if the society perpetuates the emotions that can spiral into hatred. Fear may not be beholden to logic, but I believe our language must be.
