In the twenty years I've been alive, the United States has faced no shortage of disease outbreaks. The one I remember most vividly is Swine Flu in 2009, but with the more recent Ebola and Zika outbreaks, one would be forgiven for assuming that the country exists in a state of perpetual danger, constantly pummeled by a barrage of ever-worsening illnesses, only one germ away from desolation. Yet that one germ needed to push the US over the edge never seems to arrive. The US always pulls through with relative ease, waits for the next disease, and then immediately forgets about the last one (for example, how many of you completely forgot about Zika until this very moment?). The question then becomes "why?" Why do we react the way we do to disease, why do we keep repeating the same song and dance, and what does this tell us about Covid-19? Perhaps the best way to address these questions is to consider a past similar illness: the 2003 SARS outbreak.
When a farmer from Shunde, China died at the tail end of 2002, he didn't know that he was the first of a series of respiratory deaths traceable to a specific colony of horseshoe bats. He didn't just start one pandemic, though. His infection may have lead to the spread of a coronavirus, but it also lead to the spread of a much more dangerous disease: mass psychogenic illness. SARS was rare. Out of six and a half billion people, only about eight thousand caught it. This isn't because of extremely restrictive quarantine procedures, either. The CDC issued warnings not to travel to China or Southern Asia, but no governments implemented stay-at-home orders. The virus came and went without infecting all that many people. The real danger came in the public's reaction. A study by the Italian Institute of Health found that as much as 12% of news coverage was dedicated to the outbreak of a disease in a country which had only four cases (all of whom recovered.) The overrepresentation had little information. Another study by Brock University found that despite a constant stream of SARS media, as many as 70% of students failed a basic SARS literacy test. From this information, we can reach the following conclusions: when there is threat of a virus, no matter how minimal, the media inflates it to hyperbolic proportions without distributing real information.
Covid-19 is in fact a strain of SARS, and a far more benign one at that. SARS killed about 10% of those it infected, as opposed to Covid-19's 3.4%. Like Covid-19, SARS put the elderly at more risk than the general population, but unlike Covid-19 it killed about half of those over 65. SARS was far deadlier. Given this, the expected response to Covid-19 would be even more relaxed. The expected response did not occur. Instead, the planet stopped spinning. Businesses stopped operation and people stayed home, not by choice, but under threat of persecution. As with SARS, Covid-19 gave birth to two diseases. This time, though, while the respiratory illness was nothing unusual, the mass hysteria was unprecedented.
Wartime iconography has permeated the public discourse of Covid-19 for reasons we discussed here. This is confusing. No one is on the side of the virus. No one wants the virus to win. The only conflict is over the necessity of quarantine procedures, and given the photos we dissected - photos of calm, rational nurses and explosively emotional protesters - it's clear which side narratives prefer. The media needs Covid-19 to be a war. It is necessary that the disease is exaggerated in this dramatic and exciting way. The more similar the virus is to a war, the more invested people are in supporting the sweeping decisions of governments and media conglomerates. Of course, propaganda is self-propagating. As more people become invested in beating the virus, the more memes like this crop up, and the more we see "Stay inside, save lives" shared. In fact, that's not the only platitude. Phrases like "In these uncertain times" have become ridiculously commonplace, ignoring that these times aren't uncertain. We lived through them before in 2003. The reaction to Covid-19 is disastrous, and it's for one simple reason. It's all a performance. It's all a designated set of actions designed to save the performers in case something goes wrong, even at the expense of regular people. That is the greatest disease of all.
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