We Have Everything to Fear, Aside from Fear Itself

"This [coronavirus threat] hits all the hot buttons that lead to heightened risk perception."
"We're hearing about the fatalities. We're not hearing about the 98 or so percent of people who are recovering from it and may have had mild cases."
"We're conditioned by our experiences. But experience can mislead us to be too comfortable."
"Our feelings don't do arithmetic very well."
Paul Slovic, psychologist, modern risk psychology, University of Oregon

Coping with stress and anxiety   CAMH

Famously, millions of people are transported yearly by airplane. There are vanishingly few plane crashes with serious loss of life given the amount and regularity of air traffic. On the other hand, the death toll of highway accidents is far greater but we take that for granted. When there's an airliner crash, people can feel somewhat vulnerable, but they can also rationalize that it's only one crash. On the other hand, when there are two successive airplane accidents with significant loss of life for each, peoples' inner warning signals sound the alarm and flight becomes very risky in peoples' minds for a period of time.

When a tentative flight goes as scheduled with nothing untoward happening, and then another, the reassurance of flight safety resumes in peoples' minds and the feeling of fear evaporates. Any time a risk presents itself the brain, on autopilot, looks for memories of similar situations in an effort to swiftly assess possible risk. If it can dredge up memories that link to that particular risky situation the brain rates the danger as high.

With the current state of universal alarm over the appearance of a novel coronavirus that has been ripping across continents, laying populations low, killing the health-vulnerable and the elderly, a state of shared alarm has arisen. And then there are those in the minority who feel the situation and the danger it presents is hugely overblown. They're the ones who cannot take orders to physically isolate seriously. They might dredge up figures for seasonal flu which yearly kills the elderly and the health-impaired.

The death rate of the novel coronavirus is still in dispute; it varies from country to country and it has been busy mutating, to the extent that it is now estimated that eight versions of COVID-19 are currently in circulation. Some 'experts' estimate the coronavirus can be up to 20 times as deadly as the effects of the flu, while others estimate it at 0.15 percent for those outside of Hubei Province. And now Italy has overtaken Wuhan for the number of fatalities and the infected, with the U.S. moving right up to overtaking both with infections and deaths.

Stigma and prejudice -- CAMH

The mind, according to Dr.Ann Bostrom at University of Washington, has its ways of measuring danger and the virus happens to ping on close to every cognitive trigger in people's minds. Here, we speak of human nature and the survival imperative, bringing brain/mind to high alert. These are subconscious biases inherited by all humans, to consider risk, leading to the impulses guiding responses.

In the 1980s, researchers discovered that people make use of a set of mental shortcuts to measure danger, tending to perform these shortcuts unconsciously, succumbing to instinct. In the case of the novel coronavirus; its background is still obscure enough, its infectious rate alarming enough, its kill-rate uncertain and most certainly frightening enough, adding hugely to a universal sense of insecurity when even medical personnel treating the ill are dying, though they're neither elderly nor necessarily health-compromised, but virally exposed.

Yet the ordinary seasonal flu that kills thousands of people yearly is a known quantity, one we're familiar with; it returns like clockwork, and there is a vaccine against it, however imperfect since that pathogen too changes year-over-year and vaccines go into swift production to produce a herd-immunity effect. Because the yearly influenza virus is so familiar to us, it is casually regarded, as a mild threat because of its reliability of presentation.

Humans are genetically conditioned to click onto new threats, to try to detect causes for alarm. And when such causes are discovered, the human mind launches into an obsession over imagined possibilities based on exterior warnings -- and the news media everywhere seems to have clasped the novel coronavirus and its deadly trajectory through population bases as a thrilling new horror story, transfixing the public with dread.

After all, our best, most seasoned scientific minds, the experts in virology and epidemiology are themselves uncertain, frantically searching for reliable understanding of this new threat to human health and longevity. They view the consequences of the SARS/coVid-2 advance with professional but not detached focus knowing its toll, and stressing on its emergency nature to respond. Under such circumstances, why wouldn't the greater public be alarmed?