Here is an awesome article that is a must-read. You don’t need to understand every word, but You’ll likely come away knowing more about something that has been bothering you. It sure has bothered me.
One warning before you read, though: in the end you will not get all of the answers raised during the pandemic. It does not explain everyone’s behavior and it will not offer you any comfort.
Should you read it or store it as a pdf file for later, keep that in mind. Remember that with the SARS-CoV-2 onset and the initial failure of methods for treatment being arrived at, nobody knew what to do. It overwhelmed us like a deadly blizzard until we were buried, reduced to using refrigerator truck-trailers to store corpses. It may be easy now to forget so many details, because we were all on sensory overload. The brain takes things at its best speed, and when it does overload, shock or some other mechanism slows everything down. Trauma? Yes, I talk about that a lot, but with good reason; everyone goes through traumatic events, perhaps varying in severity, but in the brain, it seems the damage is not always so apparent. Damage does show up in brain scans, although it must be actually looked for by a trained diagnostician to be interpreted as damage from posttraumatic stress disorder.
I’m mentioning PTSD because the article doesn’t. Yet some of the damage associated with the syndrome may be worsened by such a crisis as a pandemic, and may even affect the mechanisms required to respond rationally to anything, much less a health crisis.
For example, I know of two people with PTSD who responded similarly, then very differently to the early part of the pandemic.
Both knew each other. One had almost certainly had the virus. Both agreed that improvising masks when none could be found was a good idea. One went over everything brought in from a grocery with sanitary wipes, the other couldn’t find them in stores or online. One knew that the other had been very sick and advised turning often when lying down and even sleeping on the “stomach”. It probably saved the life of the sick one. The dry cough turned productive and gradually that person felt better, but certainly not overnight. The other subject never showed symptoms. That was the one wiping down everything brought in from the outside.
We have since learned that such a precaution was never necessary, although hand washing seemed crucial. As masks became available and in areas where people actually used them, numbers of morbidity and mortality decreased. The decline was definite, easily visible on line graphs.
This is where the article comes in. I’ll let you read and soak it in, but we know that many people denied that COVID-19 was real and cooked up conspiracy theories to explain the shutdown. They denied that anyone had died, much less in so many numbers. That is, of course, until they or someone they knew went into a critical care unit. People they knew didn’t come back. Some said only hours before their death, “It’s real” and via video calls begged their families to take it seriously.
But even if they believed that it was real, conspiracy theories covered that and the mortality rate: it was manufactured, or engineered, if you will, by the Chinese. It was deliberately spread to the world by infected subjects via air travel. Stories were out there of people boarding planes feeling fine but deathly ill by time to land. These stories fed “proof” to conspiracy theorists who then spread their interpretation far and wide via internet. When it became clear that people believed these theories and Donald Trump began calling it the “China virus,” hate crimes against all Asians became prevalent. Sure, it’s disgusting, but it happened. It is still happening.
People would look up and see a private, single engine Cessna circling as it climbed-out after takeoff, and suddenly the skies were full of Asians using chemtrails to spread the virus. Or it was the CIA, or anyone else you can imagine.
The whole idea took a different turn some time in early spring, 2020. Focus on bioengineering switched locations to from Wuhan Province to USAMRIID, Fort Detrick, Maryland. It went from there to the University of North Carolina, where some puddinghead found out that research on coronaviruses was ongoing. When it came to light (it wasn’t a secret) that studies included modifying a virus and infecting modified mice, the staff in that department were issued death threats.
The novel coronavirus which causes the disease COVID-19 has repeatedly been proven to originate in wildlife. In earlier outbreaks of coronaviruses like SARS and MERS, the virus had evolved by going from bats to other animals, then making the jump to humans. With this one, it came directly from bats and didn’t need a middle host animal.
Republicans had a field day with conspiracy theories, all of which, Trump claimed implicitly, were to make him look bad. He was desperate to downplay the COVID-19 pandemic or to thrust false allegations to deflect what he thought made him look bad. Fox News and OANN scrambled to make liberals and Asians appear guilty for creating the virus and inflating the numbers.
In a now infamous interview, though, Trump seemed to have had a mental break, and flat-out told the opposite of what he had said in the beginning: that it was fake, then that a “few cases, and it will be gone”. In that interview he was a actually clear: “It’s the plague,” he said. And he described exactly how easy it was to catch.
Later he would act as if the interview was a deep fake. And he went right off the deep end. In a press conference, he said it could easily be beaten by injecting disinfectant into patients because “I hear it does a real number on the lungs” and worse, that ultraviolet lights could be inserted into the body cavity to kill the virus. Either treatment would be fatal.
After he had endorsed hydroxychloroquine as a treatment or a preventive and caused chaos enough, because anti-masking activists actually took it, and some died anyway, this press conference stands out as one of the most outrageous ever given by a United States president.
There has never been more concrete evidence that conspiracy theories are extremely harmful. Homicides were committed over these during the pandemic’s peak, and even after. People died because some people whose brains malfunctioned spread bullshit to a population with a growing sense of panic.
When shops closed, family businesses like delicatessens, when people lost jobs, they foamed at the mouth for someone to blame. I’m all for placing rightful blame where it belongs, but after that blame is fixed, cooler heads must prevail. Justice cannot be served by angry acts of or by vigilantism. If you haven’t noticed, US prisons aren’t a solution either; too many innocent people populate those Hell holes, and midemeanants never belong there at all.
In the sad case of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no blame, not for the origin of the coronavirus that causes it. There is plenty of blame for everyone still adhering to conspiracy theories. For smear campaigns and death threats. For homicides and hate crimes. True, the first link I posted above does explain why some people are especially vulnerable to conspiracy theories and it’s tragic. It’s not their fault and we need studies that can end in ways to treat them. But that doesn’t account for everyone else who were, and still are, motivated by politics and religion.
The first step comes with understanding the difference and continuing the mission of telling the truth and trusting the scientific and scholarly communities. Because the bug that will cause the next Pandemic? It already exists. It just needs to make the jump. Time to gather what we’ve learned and prepare ourselves.
Memoirs of an American Christian 