Faking Out the Invisible Threat

“I am not the coronavirus!,” a frustrated me said too loudly to my also frustrated teens in the early days of voluntary quarantining, before restrictions were more commonplace in the US — so, you know, just a mere 5 days ago. Our son had just come home from college when his university moved to distance learning. Because a COVID-19 case had been diagnosed in a campus building he frequents daily, and the rest of us have highly interactive lives with volumes of people as well, we — or shall I say I — had planned to isolate the family for some time to protect others.

But our younger children, also both teenagers, were not amused. They were distressed. Like many of us, they had a hard time understanding probabilities, exponential growth, high contagion values. How could things be going so wrong on such a beautiful day?

My poor parenting moment came after a long conversation about these plans that I had thought had been going well. But the rug had just been pulled out beneath them. Relentless questions about “when-when-when?” things would resume fueled my own distress, and colored how I heard their questions. They seemed to want unequivocal answers that I of course could not give. To them and to me, I became the gateway between the prison of the house and freedom to interact with others. To them, I was the one possessing the permission slip, the get-out-of jail-free card. And that is when I desperately proclaimed, “I AM NOT THE CORONAVIRUS!,” and then “THE CORONAVIRUS IS IN CHARGE—NOT ME.”

Naturally this was unhelpful. We reset, and I managed to put some of my own research into place: we put internal timelines on plans to create our own risk communication protocol within the household: “I think we are ahead of the curve compared to others, which is hard because our friends aren’t doing this. For now, we will isolate for 5 days to see if symptoms turn up. We’ll reassess then as science and clinical practice tell us more.” The turn in mood and resulting collective action was remarkable. I highly recommend this approach.

But this boils down to a fundamental concept that I think helps explain the nature of the threat, without probabilities and other communicative infrastructure:

We have to fake out the virus. Given what matters to the virus, humans must not exist.

That’s it. That is the matter reduced to a nutshell, without getting embroiled in understanding probabilities, contagion spread, and exponential growth. From our point of view, the virus can’t find other hosts. And to that end, we are converting our households into bunkers.

This is not unlike recent sci fi thriller movies about ruthless monsters who detect human senses to murderously target people (sight, for Bird Box; sound, for A Quiet Place). What do those fictional people do? They hunker down in their bunkers household by household, suspend their activity in the public sphere, and simulate human nonexistence.

I might not show such movies to young people, or others who might be more triggered than usual in today’s pandemic. But perhaps reducing the complexities of risk communication into what it means for action—specifically, hiding—in the physical world might be something tangible to translate into our different situations.

Perhaps then we can be reminded that staying in our bunkers is a collective ruse against an invisible threat—that we are outsmarting something that is only fast, but not clever. We carry on, all together in our isolation.

Leysia Palen has been conducting crisis informatics research since 2004 as a Professor of Information Science and Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. She and her research can be found at https://cmci.colorado.edu/~palen/.

This is the fourth article in a series on research and reflection during the novel coronavirus pandemic.