So What is Really Causing Our Crude Reactions to Coronavirus?
Part 2 of 3 Profiling — Continuation of Mental Health in the Covid World
Lack of Trust in Government and Institutions
According to the Pew Research Center, public trust in government reached its peak in 1964, with 77 percent favorability. It’s near historic lows of around 17 percent today. With the exception of a few extraordinary incidents, the trajectory for trust in government has been a straight downward curve for the last half century. The same trend is echoed in Gallup’s poll regarding other public institutions like the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, churches, public schools, and the news media.
People didn’t spontaneously develop a crippling distrust of government; “they endured Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Iraq, Katrina, the financial crisis, the presidency of Donald Trump, Citizens United, corporate concentration, Cambridge Analytica, and 40 years of stagnant wages and skyrocketing inequality”. Moreover, American conservatives who believe in the fundamental flaws of government, are hellbent on sending through a wrecking ball of public service dissolution, at all costs. This includes Trump’s defunding of the entire global health security unit of the National Security Council, eliminating the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund, reducing national health spending by $15 billion, and slashing the CDC’s budget by 80%.
But this bleak phenomenon seems uniquely applicable to the West; Harvard researchers concluded that following 2003 the SARS outbreak, citizens from Hong King, Singapore, or Taiwan were significantly more likely than Americans to trust government information about public health. Consider that this was long before the “Baghdad Bob–style pronouncements about coronavirus from this president and his loyal disciples”. Trumps relationship to the truth and fact-based information in recent months is more precarious than ever; his comments are almost always at odds with reality. Since January, Trump has downplayed the threat for nakedly political reasons almost like clockwork, rejecting recommendations from experts and clinicians alike. He even went as far claiming that he didn’t want an infected cruise ship with Americans on board to dock because he liked the “infection numbers” staying where they were. Rather than leading the country through its greatest period of turmoil since taking office, Trump’s only modus operandi seems to be ratings and the upcoming election, with all else either coming secondary or in direct opposition to his goals.
In addition to the incongruent communications and utter lack of leadership, we’ve had a failure in technical and medical response too. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s botched testing kits set the US back in identifying exposure to the virus. China’s national health commission said the situation was “preventable” and “controllable”. And in early January, the World Health Organization even stated that the virus was “not likely transmitted from human-to-human”. The inconsistent facts, combined with the initial (potentially deliberate) downplaying of the virus by several governments, in particular, China and the US, eroded trust in both data veracity and capacity for response.
So what happens when uncertainty rules and official sources are no longer trusted? We must resort to our own assessments of risk. Panic and fear can induce irrationality into any calculus. And when political conversations rub against logic, people will hitch to their arguments. Forced even further down the rabbit hole of self-imposed echo chambers, we blind ourselves to any potential truth. This causes society to atomize further. As British Economist William Forster Lloyd first argued when he coined the term “tragedy of the commons”, in a society where resources are shared, individuals prioritizing their own self-interest can deprive others. People are not only fearful about catching the virus, they are uncertain about the future, and they distrust their governments. Therefore the default of right-wing populism, premised on limited sense of shared solidarity, is almost the most logical response. The community can no longer provide a sense of safety or justify individual sacrifice.
This is particularly visible in the US, where each state was tasked to fight its own battle. The EU as well. There was no coordinated support, no consistent rhetoric, no public or humble acknowledgement of the threat early on, no candor. In a war time situation, those at battle are led by a Commander-in-Chief who cogently identifies the threat, lays out a rational plan backed by data or experience, and disseminates through its pre-ordained channels, the plan of attack. This serves to quell disintermediation, to preempt fear and overreaction, and to empower actors within. If we’re talking about this as a war, why aren’t we borrowing the lessons from the veterans who’ve actually faced war? A fragmented and top-down system is exactly the opposite of what you need when fighting a network spread. With each state (or country) opportunistically fending for itself, competition is fostered creating a mindset of every man for himself. Reports of increased sales of firearms speak loudest to this phenomenon — it’s not like any rational person thinks they’re going to shoot a virus, so who is the gun for? People have entirely lost confidence that the system is going to work.
I think we’ll come to blame many of the second- and third-order consequences of the crisis on a categoric failure of leadership. As Henry Kissinger wrote, “nations cohere and flourish on the belief that their institutions can foresee calamity, arrest its impact and restore stability. When the Covid-19 pandemic is over, many countries’ institutions will be perceived as having failed. Whether this judgment is objectively fair is irrelevant”. Almost systemically, the lack of true political, scientific and cultural leadership has propelled society into a state of fear and panic, that to some degree, could have been avoided.
No Consistent Data or Clear Timeline
And once you have a dearth of information because there’s no clear leadership, people are left to create their own stories. The media latches on to half-baked narratives and embellishes, infers and critiques through headlines aimed at earning eyeballs and likes rather than sharing facts. Indeed, even the scientists are still lacking science-backed data, so many of the recommendations are based on educated-guesses, at best. The uncertainty of incubation, infectiousness, manners of transmission, immunity, and death rate has left many scrambling for information, creating space for charlatans and bad actors to insert their own self-benefitting narratives. The combination leads to panic and suboptimal, or ill-informed decisions. Upbeat reassurances from President Trump contrasted with bland quasi-scientific statements from epidemiologists who suggested a looming crisis, that “would get much worse before it gets better”, confuse the public, leaving them stranded to their own devices.
But the constant bombardment of conflicting information and insecurity has rather insidious effects on our psychology. “I cannot give a blueprint or a recipe of statistics for when it will be advisable for people to leave their homes again”, said Lothar Wieler, president of the Robert Koch Institute, the German government’s body in charge of disease-monitoring and control. Indefinite quarantines with no well-defined end point — such as those imposed in Wuhan — risk having the most negative side-effects. The term “fatigue” conjures up middle-class sacrifices, but for some there are harsher realities that make compliance with extensive social distancing measures — like those employed in Italy — more difficult. “It’s just a sense of all-over-the-place-ness”. People are experiencing prolonged uncertainty, acute stress, grief that the world you’ve known is suddenly unpredictable.
Unemployment and Livelihood Loss
Economic stress is one of the fastest causes of a breakdown in social order. Coronavirus is imbuing a sense of insecurity at a very basic level, at an intensity that is new to most of us.
In the last three weeks, more than 16 million people have filed for unemployment insurance in the US alone. That is 10% of the workforce. And these numbers actually understate the extent of the problem as they exclude gig workers who aren’t even eligible for unemployment insurance. The next few weeks won’t bring much of a respite; economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman thinks the US unemployment rate could reach 20% in a few weeks. That would be twice the peak level of unemployment as the Great Financial Crisis, and almost as high as the staggering 25% peak in the Great Depression. Over two-thirds of American adults anticipate the coronavirus to impact their financial situation due to unexpected medical expenses, inability to work and declining value of stock portfolios. Oxfam calculates that the pandemic could plunge 500 million people into poverty, rising global poverty levels for the first time in three decades. One facetious Twitter account claimed, “it’s like we’re living in Pride Rock when Scar took over”.
And individual psychology also trickles up to affect companies. Both Apple and Nintendo announced negative revenue projections due to bottlenecks in components manufactured in China. China’s economy is 4 times more consequential than it was during SARS in 2003, responsible for approximately 16% of global GDP. The delays in China’s production directly impacts the bottom line of companies the world over. Combined with effects on sales due to store closures and reticent shoppers means consumer products are being hit hard. Investment and supply-chain decisions are governed by projections about demand during an epidemic and the recovery from it. So while many will revel in the downfall of corporatism and materialistic consumption, the reality is, it’s the livelihood of the employees of these giants, that will suffer most; companies will inevitably get bailouts, but the global pandemic of unemployment will be slower to recover.
And critically there is one thing that almost all shocks have in common is that they hit the poorest and the most vulnerable the hardest. They act as poverty multipliers, forcing families into extreme poverty owing to unexpected healthcare costs and forcing those without a financial safety net, living paycheck-to-paycheck, out of their income stream. At least half of the world’s population does not enjoy full coverage for the most basic health services or even have savings to last through a month.
This is, of course, a financial challenge for many who have suddenly lost their income, but it also presents a psychological challenge. Losing any job can be emotionally taxing, but to do so in our current environment of heightened uncertainty can add additional stressors into the mix. Psychologists note that losing a job often equates to the grief of losing a loved one; the emotional trajectory can include any of the stages of grief, which run from shock and denial, through to anger and bargaining. For those in unhealthy relationships, being locked up for weeks or months with a partner — especially with one who has suffered a loss of livelihood — can even led to a spike in domestic violence.
So how do we measure the health consequences of taking people’s lives, jobs, leisure and purpose, and presenting them with outsized physical dangers at home? Which causes least harm? The moral debate is not: lives versus money. It is lives versus lives. The wider implications of halting the economy and confining people to their homes, might in fact, be worse than the immediate health risks of the virus. The interruption of children’s education, the rise in mental ill-health; the depression, the suicides, the loneliness and fear. There will be difficult tradeoffs between doing everything possible to save lives from Covid-19, and indirectly causing other life-threatening harms.
The Grief
Being in lockdown requires extraordinary mental gymnastics. Physiologically speaking, our limbic system has been in overdrive for months. The amygdala — the fear center of our brain — is responsible for detecting threats and preparing for emergency events; or primitively, calculating whether to fight, flight, or freeze. All three manifest physically; our bodies instinctively shut down non-essential functions to allocate energy to our emergency response. But in the instance of coronavirus, we can’t fight or flee, so we become frozen. And when we freeze, we signal our bodies to become lethargic. This is why many people are experiencing physical exhaustion as they grapple with the onslaught of new information and oppressive experiences. It’s a basic biological response.
The acute stress and prolonged uncertainty that comes with no end in sight; the grief that comes with the world that you have known no longer being predictable. Everyone has different coping styles to grief, and how they deal with the unknown. Shout, a free 24-hour texting service for people in crisis has experienced a steady increase in the number of people contacting them, peaking at more than 1,000 conversations. “It is just anxiety, anxiety, anxiety,” says Amy, one of Shout’s Crisis Volunteers. It’s a pervasive theme of lack of control, which is a feeling most akin to grief.
Grief is not just about death in the physical sense. It’s the grief that accompanies a worldview. And what happens when you have a plague, when you have a pandemic, is that you are reminded that death can randomly exterminate you, throwing your world completely upside down. And what’s even worse, are the narratives warning us that “the worst is yet to come”. It’s like we’ve been suspended at the beginning of a horror film as the action is building up, and we know the boogey man is just around the corner. Everyone is talking about it coming and we’re getting really scared for what’s about to come. That impending loss is called “anticipatory grief”. And it some ways, it’s more torturous than immediate loss because we aren’t given permission to truly release it. We’re just waiting, in limbo, for some unknown future precipice of loss.
And since grief is non-linear, people experience the process differently. This is why some people stockpile; they’re getting into gear to fight the battle. And why others have felt delayed reactions; we were in denial: it was always happening elsewhere, not here. And even the bargaining, where we desperately seek to alleviate the chaos and confusion through that third closet purge and photo album reorg. With grief, release and acceptance mark the final stage, when one can finally detach from old realities and accept a new one. And the hope is that the new reality will reveal something better, perhaps more, human, than before.
