Countries across the world are closing borders, global markets are in free fall. The S&P 500 experienced the largest single-day decline since 1987 on March 12. People are coming to blows over toilet paper, and facemasks and hand sanitizer are flying off store shelves, creating shortages and hemorrhaging access for healthcare workers.
In Ukraine, a busload carrying evacuees from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus, to an isolation center in Novy Sanzhary on Feb. 20 was met by a mob throwing stones and setting fire to tires. Ten police officers were injured. At that point, the country had no confirmed cases of the coronavirus.
The event is a microcosm of a global panic that has set in, propelled by a combination of public mistrust and misinformation compounded by the unrelated anxiety of our times.
The world has experienced this sort of panic many times before. But Amy L. Fairchild, the dean of Ohio State University’s College of Public Health who has written excellent assessments of the evolving public response to viral disease, argues that mass became a thing of the past as society learned to manage the diseases. The advent of permanent health departments and microbial science that identified of the cause of viruses in the late 19th century radically diminished the panics that had once been common.
Before then, public virus hysteria was cyclical, Fairchild writes, and compounded by underlying social unease.
It was a frequent occurrence in the American South in the years after the Civil War, when towns and cities were decimated, the currency collapsed and the region was falling far behind the Northern victors.
The trauma found expression in responses to waves of yellow fever in the late 1800s. An 1873 outbreak in Shreveport, Louisiana led residents to tear up railroad tracks and impose quarantines with shotguns. “Indignation is at fever heat here,” stated a news account, “and the people say that if necessary … they will burn every bridge between here and Vicksburg.”
That sort of panic diminished as the cause of the disease was identified and stable mechanisms for treatment emerged. Amid the Spanish Influenza, history’s deadliest pandemic, “while there was plenty of talk about panic… little of it was actually happening. Panic was almost a dirty word,” Fairchild wrote in 2013.
And this coronavirus pales in comparison to that disease. According to the Center for Disease Control, Spanish Influenza infected 500 million people, one-third of the world’s population, and killed at least 50 million. That’s a mortality rate of 10%, many of whom were young people without underlying illnesses.
Coronavirus, by comparison, has a mortality rate under 1% according to Chris Whitty, England’s chief Medical officer; 80% of cases have mild symptoms, and severe cases overwhelmingly affect the elderly and those with existing health conditions.
And yet panic has set in.
Of course, hand washing is important, and social isolation should be a first step if symptoms occur. But there is something different about the hysteria we are experiencing, something about the panicked purchasing of toilet paper, the mob pelting the bus of evacuees with stones, that harkens to a decidedly pre-modern sensibility.
In Ukraine in particular, where trust in public systems is lower than in much of the West and anxiety rages over the continuing war in the country’s East, hysteria is correlated to underlying societal dis-ease.
These are deeply uncertain times. The world is inundated with information about the apocalyptic fires of Australia, the Antarctic ice melting faster than worst-case scenario predictions, and there is nothing we can do. The political world is ceding to strongmen figures who respond to the uncertainty be peddling misinformation and igniting hate.
Yet with coronavirus, many seem to see an avenue for a return to agency. Wash hands with compulsive rigor, stockpile canned goods and antiseptics, form a mob to keep uninfected evacuees out of your town and all may be well.
But as we’re now seeing, the panic has in many ways become worse than the virus itself. As it spreads, so does the isolation, the sense of lost control, the market freefall.
Our real power lies in our response to the fear. It’s up to us to keep the contagion at bay.
