Coronavirus is spreading around the globe in a hurry, but experts say fear-based reactions will only stir more trouble.
SAN FRANCISCO — Coronavirus is in the global spotlight, but a secondary character in this unfolding drama threatens to upstage the grim protagonist: fear.
In less than two months, the new coronavirus, given the less-scary clinical moniker of COVID-19, has gone from a spikey-shaped virus infecting people in Wuhan, China, to an epidemic that has sickened more than 82,000 people, killed more than 2,000 and spread to 47 countries on all continents.Adding to the chaos are tumbling financial markets and often conflicting responses to the spread of the virus. Italy, dealing with hundreds of cases, has a few northern towns on lockdown.
Already some stores are seeing dwindling supplies of toilet paper and water as residents perhaps prepared to self-quarantine for two weeks. A dearth of N95 face masks led Amazon to battle third-party sellers accused of price-gouging consumers. This comes despite experts saying face masks provide little real protection.
“Look for outlets that treat you like an adult and tell you what the situation is and the risks are,” he says. “You need information that helps you make decisions relevant to your own circumstances.” For example, she says, in San Francisco, it's far more likely to be killed by a car than COVID-19, “but cars are something we know, we’re comfortable with them, so they’re not scary even though they’re far more deadly.”
“In some ways, fear in these situations becomes existential in that we fear the other, we fear that they’re bringing something bad to us, and this is unfortunate,” says Guenter Risse, professor emeritus at the University of California-San Francisco and the author of “Driven by Fear: Epidemics and Isolation in San Francisco’s House of Pestilence,” about how panic and xenophobia demonized Chinese immigrants here during illness outbreaks in the 1920s.
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