Hi,
It has been a strange and alarming thing to see pictures and footage of bars, cafes and pubs in the UK and the US looking crowded at the same time that it’s becoming clear that social distancing is the only way that the coronavirus pandemic can be limited. Seeing people in bars while others are panic buying and emptying the shelves in the supermarkets is confusing. If we’re so alarmed as to drain the shops from pasta and toilet paper, then it makes no sense that some of us are happy to go and mingle with others in packed venues.
But there is a hardwired feature of humanity that’s really hard to undo - we feel clear and in control of the immediate and real, but not over the abstract that occurs in the future. Toilet paper and food are real, tangible things. We have experienced hunger and scarcity before and are familiar with them. Catching a new disease, even one that is shutting down the whole world, is an abstract thing.
Even when illnesses are not new, we struggle to be aware of them if we have never succumbed to them. Having caught several infections after taking a long-haul flight has made me alert to the risks of not washing hands and disinfecting airplane seats. Before I made the association between flying and rough, sharp colds and stomach bugs, I would laugh at others who did the same.
In the very first few days of the virus, when we were all even more complacent than we are now, I spoke to a doctor who told me that one of the main reasons viruses spread, and did spread throughout history, is that lawmakers were legislating for the wrong thing. We think the problem is going to be panic, rather than complacency. But counterintuitively, humans find it harder to grasp serious intangible threats than they do small, trivial immediate ones. To put it bluntly, we are more scared of running out of toilet paper than we are of catching a deadly disease.
The biggest challenge at the moment is working against these impulses. Governments play a role in enforcing shutdowns, but without going to extreme measures, they cannot monitor how we socialise and behave in our own social circles.
My own challenge this week is, every time I am about to embark on an unnecessary violation of social distancing due to falling victim to an irrational short term fear, I will ask myself: are you more afraid of running out of one household item that you can definitely in extremis do without, or of catching a potentially deadly virus and passing it on to all your loved ones?
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