The fear of the coronavirus is more dangerous than the virus itself

An article written in March 2020

Three years ago, in the early days of the corona crisis, I published an opinion piece entitled “The fear of the coronavirus is more dangerous than the virus itself”. It pointed out the danger that in the corona crisis, the remedy could be far worse than the disease. The article warned that society was not so much in the grip of facts as of a narrative constructed about facts. The big question is: what facts were they? In recent weeks, more and more facts have surfaced. Think of the lockdown files in Great Britain and the Cochrane study on the effectiveness of the corona measures. You can read my previously published opinion piece below. I republish it here because I will write a follow up to this article shortly.

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Needless to say, our society is going through an unprecedented crisis - a crisis of which we cannot yet estimate the political, economic, social and psychological consequences. It is gripped by a story about a virus - a story that is undoubtedly based on facts. But what facts? We first caught a glimpse of ‘the facts’ through a story about a virus in China that forced local authorities to take the most drastic measures. Entire cities were quarantined, new hospitals were built hastily, individuals in white suits disinfected public spaces, etc. Here and there, it was heard that the totalitarian Chinese government was overreacting and that the new virus was no worse than the flu. Furthermore, the reverse was also suggested: that it must be much worse than was stated, because no government would otherwise take such far-reaching measures. At that point, everything was still far removed from our shores and we assumed that the story did not allow us to know the exact facts, let alone understand their meaning.

Until the moment that the virus arrived in Europe. We now began registering the number of infections and deaths for ourselves. We saw images of overcrowded emergency rooms in Italy, convoys of army vehicles transporting corpses, morgues full of coffins. From then on, story and facts seemed to merge and uncertainty gave way to certainty. Rightly so? That is open to discussion. For example, how do we determine who dies ‘from’ COVID-19? If someone who is old and in poor health ‘gets the coronavirus’ and dies, did that person then die ‘from’ the virus? How do we know, and what determines our analysis at this point of time?

The same holds for determining the mortality rate of the virus. This also turns out to be far from unambiguous. As experts agree upon: The real number of infections is probably at least ten times higher than the number of diagnosed infections. This means, among other things, that the estimate of the degree of mortality, or the danger of the virus, varies enormously. One hundred infected individuals with four deaths have a mortality rate of 4 percent; 1,000 infected individuals with four deaths have a mortality rate of 0.4 percent; 2,000 infected individuals with four deaths have a mortality rate of 0.2 percent. If we start from that more realistic number of infections, the coronavirus suddenly looks a lot less dangerous. And the same goes for the 'appreciation' of the number of fatalities. At present, approximately 16,000 fatalities worldwide are assumed. Is that much? At first glance, yes. Until you realize that between 290,000 and 640,000 people die from the flu each year, according to The Lancet. Sixteen thousand suddenly sounds less impressive.

This is what I mean to say: In this crisis, there is no certainty to be found in the numbers, as they are not objective data. They are constructed on the basis of subjective assumptions and agreements. And as such, it is important to consider something that we seem to overlook in our panic: What determines our response to ‘the virus’ is not the facts per se, but the story constructed around the facts.

That story is being constructed by healthcare workers who genuinely do their upmost best to help, by people who don’t want to see their fellow men suffer, by politicians who want to make the right decisions, by academics who want to provide information as objectively as possible. But the story is also constructed by politicians who are under the pressure of public opinion and feel compelled to act decisively, by leaders who have lost control of society and see their opportunity to take back the reins, by experts who have to hide their ignorance, by academics who see a chance to assert themselves, by man’s inherent propensity for hysteria and drama, by pharmaceutical companies that smell dollar bills, by media that thrive on sensational stories, for example through testimonies of unique cases for whom the course of the disease was exceptionally difficult,…

And above all, the story is mainly constructed by fear and psychological distress that had been growing in all layers of society for quite some time. In the years and months preceding the outbreak of the corona crisis, the signs that society was heading for a psychological crisis could hardly be denied. Sick leave due to psychological suffering and the use of psychotropic drugs followed an exponential curve; the diagnosis of burnout reached epidemic proportions and threatened the functioning of entire organizations, companies and government institutions; the vision of the future was increasingly tainted with pessimism and lack of perspective. Should civilization not be washed away by rising sea levels, then it certainly would be swept away by refugees etc. The Grand Narrative of society - the story of the Enlightenment - no longer leads to the optimism and positivism of yesteryear, to put it mildly. From a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective, that is precisely the point where fear is situated: the point where one no longer finds certainty in a story about one's own identity.

Here is my thesis: This crisis is primarily a psychological crisis - a massive breakthrough of an already latent fear in society. Anxiety is initially only very slightly caused by real problems… but it justifies itself by creating real problems. We are already sensing these problems: on the political level, the rise of the dictatorial state, on the economic level, the recession and the bankruptcy of countless companies and self-employed persons, on the social level, a lasting impairment of the (physical) bond between people, on the psychological level even more anxiety and depression, and yes… physically, in the aftermath of the psychological and social stress, collapse of immunity and physical health.

Read the literature on psychogenic death, placebos and hypnotic sedation to ascertain how incredibly powerful the impact of psychological factors on physical illness and health can be. Without being able to break the spiral of fear and psychological discomfort into which we as a society have been slipping for decades, viruses that are still relatively harmless today can certainly wreak havoc in the future.

We have to consider the current fear as a problem in itself, a problem that cannot be reduced to ‘the facts’ of ‘a virus’ but has a cause on a completely different level, on the psychological level, the level of (failure of) the Grand Narrative of our society. The Grand Narrative of our society is the story of mechanistic science; a story in which man is reduced to a biological ‘organism’. A story that also completely ignores the psychological and symbolic dimension of the human being. This view of man is the core of the problem. Any treatment of any epidemic that starts from this view of man will only make things worse. Or as Einstein put it: You cannot solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that created it.

This is the real task we face as individuals and as a society: To construct a new story, a new ground for our identity, a new ground for our society, a new ground for living together with others. Hannah Arendt already realized that in 1954, that the old story was coming to an end and that we were therefore confronted with “the elementary problems of human living- together”. It is not primarily a material barrier against a virus that must be erected, but rather a symbolic barrier against the fear. Keeping that in mind may help to act at the right level in this crisis.