Do Your Illnesses Come in Colors?
There are bigger threats to humanity than pathogens
Getting sick is scary. Even though you know you will be better soon, there is no joy in waiting for the body to stop filling you with alarm. Illnesses are like the perfect bully. They beat us up, make us scared to get out of bed, and sometimes they stigmatize us. Nobody wants to get sick, but we all do. It is nothing to be ashamed of, or is it?
If you were roaming around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in November 2019, your chances of becoming a victim of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak would have been high. Fast forward two months, and there are twenty-seven countries affected by the epidemic. As of February 1, the number of confirmed cases exceeds 17,000 in China, and 362 of these cases have resulted in death. The reported number of cases in the remaining twenty-six territories is 132.
The symptoms of 2019-nCoV (the shortened version of its designated name, 2019 Novel Coronavirus) are almost identical to those of the seasonal flu. Even though the mortality rate remains low, nobody wants to play the lottery with an unfamiliar virus.
With the identification of a new virus, our thinking is different. We allow our worries to turn the virus into an excuse to perpetrate racism.
The current 2019-nCoV mortality rate of 2% is higher than that of the seasonal flu (0.13%), and you don’t need to have an underlying health problem to become its next victim. As the virus evolves, we will have to wait to see what future mortality rates will be. Does it mean the coronavirus is our biggest threat?
Cardiovascular diseases and cancer, combined, claim twenty-seven million lives worldwide every year. Despite this, we don’t stop filling our bodies with junk food, and the environment with toxins. We have accepted it as the way of industrial life. Most of us don’t even think about it. But with the identification of a new virus, our thinking is different. We allow our worries to turn the virus into an excuse to perpetrate racism.
It was past midnight when my partner and I received an instant message from a friend. It read: “ . . . when the man at the next table saw I was Asian, he wanted his family to be re-seated.”
My friend is not Chinese, but apparently, she was Asian enough to warrant suspicion. As her waiter tried to arrange a new table, the outraged family perceived her as the embodiment of everything wrong with this world. To them, her skin color was the symbol of danger, her facial features represented her failure, and her intentions couldn’t be good. Never mind that there were only six confirmed cases in the United States, and none of them were in her state.
Is it right to give a pass to our biases in the name of protecting our selves and our families? The initial victims of the outbreak were Chinese, but no matter how worried you are, it is baseless to think a person’s physical features make them infectious. Unlike humans, viruses don’t discriminate. Once it spreads in your town, you can catch it from anybody.
This is not an isolated incident. There are media reports about Chinese-Australians getting harassed. In Japan, the #ChineseDon’tComeToJapan hashtag trends. Does targeting people of different origins make us safer? Do we think we have superiority over our neighbors when it comes to contagious diseases? As the 2019 Novel Coronavirus spreads, will specific ethnicities become toxic in the eyes of others? Will we question the color of our illnesses? If so, to what end?
We are polluting the environment with carcenogens, poisoning our bodies with junk food, and spending our days coping with anxiety disorders with or without 2019-nCoV. It is not pathogens that threaten humanity. It is our inability to treat our fellow human beings with love and dignity.
