When Fear Goes Viral: Responding to Coronavirus

Coronavirus is so-called because the virus resembles a corona, a crown or garland. Or maybe a wreath, a word with haunting connotations of mortality. In the image it looks like a thing of beauty. But it would be wise not to get too close. 

As we all know by now, the Chinese city of Wuhan is the epicentre of this virus, its Ground Zero. Today, the ophthalmologist who tried to warn of the virus and its likely consequences has died of it. Dr Li Wenliang was reprimanded by the police in late December for “rumour-mongering” and raising alarm needlessly. He was a prophet not honoured in his own country. He acted courageously. But by the time he was listened to it was too late. Since then the Chinese authorities have taken drastic action. But the spread of the virus across the world now seems unstoppable.

What its effects may be is anyone’s guess. The World Health Organisation doesn’t know the precise reason the virus originally jumped from animal or bird species to humans, nor does it understand in detail how it is transmitted between humans. There is as yet no vaccine to prevent infections nor antibiotics to treat patients who develop bacterial pneumonia. Scientists worldwide are throwing all their efforts into addressing these known unknowns (and some unknown ones), but it takes time. 

Memories of the SARS outbreak (“Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome”) in 2003 have been rekindled - that was a coronavirus too. The question was, and still is, why does a virus that usually does nothing worse than inconvenience us by giving us a common cold dramatically turn malign and start killing people? A century ago the world was getting over the catastrophic Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 that killed more people than the Great War had done. In 2003, worldwide panic over the outbreak of SARS proved short-lived. But it taught the world how new diseases could threaten to have devastating impacts in highly mobile, interconnected societies. And how nothing short of global collaboration would be needed to combat them.

The metaphor of warfare is never far away when disease knocks on the door. Thomas Abraham, in his book of 2005 Twenty-First Century Plague: the Story of SARS struck a chilling tone. “This was an attack by an unseen invader to which nations had to respond as they would to any other attack - by mobilising the resources to repel the invader. For many countries it became clear that the real threat to security would come not from invading armies but from unknown microbes.” 

Perhaps nothing instils atavistic dread as much as disease. The rider of the white horse of the Apocalypse (the first of the so-called Four Horsemen in Revelation 6) wears a corona or crown. While his identity - is he a symbol of good or evil? - is disputed by interpreters, popular culture imagines him as the bringer of sickness and plague, a cataclysmic expression of divine judgment on a corrupt world along with famine, war and bloodshed, images of universal terror and destruction. 

These are powerful metaphors that continue to haunt the imagination, even in an age that understands the processes by which diseases are transmitted. If we thought that modernity had done away with archaic ways of responding to infection or the threat of it, consider what has happened in Newcastle this week. The Chinese community there is reporting episodes of discrimination and hate crime because of the virus. One woman, a student, posted on social media that she had been spat on while walking back to her dormitory. Others have spoken of abusive comments and people covering their faces when walking past them in the street. One owner of a Chinese take-away, who has never been to China, said he had heard of people being beaten up and bullied, and is frightened of coughing in public in case he is thought to carry the virus. The knowledge that two of the three cases so far diagnosed in the UK are being treated in Newcastle is no doubt fuelling the panic. 

We’re right to be appalled. But we need to understand what’s going on when fear goes viral. Prejudice and hatred are fed by “othering” people who are perceived to be different. And when it’s examined, othering often turns out to be driven by fear. I say “often” but I have a hunch that it’s probably always the case at the unconscious level. The leper in the Bible is a familiar image of how the feared were banished to ghettos on the margins of society where rigorously enforced isolation, permanent quarantine, put them beyond reach of the community and the risk to it of contamination. Those words leper and ghetto still carry powerful resonances as figures of speech. And when the collective psyche projects on to (in this case) Chinese people because of our terror of infection, we are reaching back into very primitive states of mind indeed.

In one of the greatest twentieth century novels, Albert Camus charts the impact of an epidemic. The Plague (La Peste) is a profound exploration of how the contagion of fear spreads through a society and paralyses it; how panicky self-interest, the survival instinct dominates all else, how preachers try to make sense of the catastrophe that is happening. This epidemic set in a North African town was fictional, but it stood for an important truth. Writing in Vichy France during the 2nd World War, Camus meant it as a metaphor of enemy invasion and occupation, and how a terrorised society reacts. But we can see in it a metaphor of another occupying power that holds sway over humanity: the effect of fear on ordinary people's lives, the corruption of motives by self-concern, putting ourselves first, protecting ourselves from harm at all costs. In an important way, it is fear that spreads a spiritual plague, not because it’s unnatural or wrong to be afraid, but because of how we respond when it takes hold of us. Camus seems to be saying that while the sickness is a terrible thing, it’s not the worst kind of disease we can be afflicted by.

I say “us” deliberately. Like viruses, fear doesn’t discriminate. We are all at risk of being infected by both of them. There’s plenty of good advice telling us what to do in the face of this virus. A lot of it is common sense. Managing fear is more tricky because of its visceral character: how do you get a handle on what we’re most afraid of and why? Getting risk in perspective is one way of telling ourselves not to get things out of proportion. We are right to be afraid of a global pandemic, and if this particular virus is not going to cause it, the next one could: epidemiologists tell us it’s not a question of whether but of when. But we are right to be afraid of lots of other hazards too, that are the price of being alive in a universe of risk and that are almost all beyond our power to control. 

Perhaps modernity over-protects us in the first world from feeling the fragility of our existence too keenly. If so, the coronavirus can help make us more aware, not least of the fears most of the human race carry with them all the time. It can give us a better sense of our solidarity with those who suffer because we know that it could be us too. To think of ourselves as “citizens of the world” is to understand our primary identity as being human beings in all the “joy and woe” that, says William Blake, we were made for, “woven fine” in the tapestry of life. Is this how we learn to build solidarities of compassion and care, tenderness and love that transfigure fear by giving us the courage and dignity to look adversity squarely in the face and resolve that our inmost selves, our souls if you like, will not be brought down by it? 

The power of love is the greatest force for good the world knows. My faith tells me that my capacity to love, feeble though it often is, reflects the image of a God whose nature and whose name is Love. Which is why the words of so many biblical messengers across the centuries, “do not be afraid!”, carry such conviction. Dealing with fear is fundamentally a spiritual task. I don’t underestimate how difficult it can be. We don’t know what the coming months will bring. But whatever ordeals lie ahead for us and for people in other parts of the world, it’s immensely heartening to remind ourselves that we are not alone. 

Meanwhile, the people of China are in our thoughts and prayers, together with all whose lives have been directly affected  by the coronavirus. In Albert Schweitzer’s words, we belong to the community of all who bear the marks of pain. This is our privilege now, and always will be.