COVID shaming -- another grim post-corona side-effect

The Quarantine Zone
1

An article in The Atlantic brought up something I hadn’t thought about yet, but it’s not surprising.

COVID-19 diagnoses start with a barrage of grueling decisions and paralyzing worries. Did I infect anyone else? Whom will I tell? Where can I isolate? Should I go to the hospital? Will I be okay?
…
Then there’s a more curious response. Some people tuck away a bout of COVID-19 like it’s a deep, dark secret. Even among those who have been fully responsible about quarantining, at least a small number have decided not to tell their closest relatives—or their friends, or anyone at all—that they are sick in the first place. Long after they recover, they hide what they’ve been through, resorting to lies and subterfuge.

The author talks to people who haven’t told anyone. One doesn’t want his 12-year old kid to run off to school and tell everybody his dad had it. A health-care worker didn’t tell her mom and grandmother because she didn’t want to add to their already over-the-top panic. The third person, calling herself “Michelle,” is a flight attendant. She was home sick with a bad case of COVID totally isolated, but even so, friends freaked out and were very judgmental about how she must have been careless to even catch it. And when she said she felt well enough to walk to her mailbox, the friend accused her of trying to infect the whole neighborhood. Michelle has continued to keep the secret from her parents, although in the past she was very close to them and told them everything. She doesn’t want them to worry that she is still contagious even though she’s over it. She has long-term symptoms, but hides them.

Here’s the money quote from the article:

But secrecy can also be motivated by one of the deepest-rooted myths around: that health is a sign of virtue, and infection a sign of sin. A particularly cruel dynamic of the coronavirus is that although everyone runs the risk of contracting it, those unlucky enough to fall ill can still feel the wrath of shame from those lucky enough not to. “It’s not surprising that people are scared of judgment when we’ve been telling them for months on end that if they take any risks, they are selfish, reckless, and irresponsible,” Julia Marcus, a Harvard epidemiologist and frequent Atlantic contributor, told me. “So of course when people test positive, their first reaction is, What did I do wrong? ”

Disease-shaming is nothing new in human behavior. Epilepsy, AIDS, even cancer (in the past) were and are seen as punishment from God for moral lapses. And COVID is quite contagious, unlike cancer and epilepsy, so a certain amount of distancing-- “shunning”-- is called for.

Epilogue on Michelle:

The last time we talked, in December, Michelle was stewing that her parents might finally be on to her. “Why not just tell them?” I asked her. She didn’t hesitate. “As long as I can get away with not telling anyone else, that’s what I plan on doing,” she said. She’s simply started spending less time in Florida with her family to escape from it all.

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Unfortunately there are so many Covid deniers and scofflaws that this judgementalism, rightly or wrongly, may be an outcome.

3

I figure there is a lot of people out there that at one point or another were sick and just never even got tested.

4

I’m trying hard to make sense of that. I would have put it down to covid-prevention enthusiasts, not covid deniers.

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To someone who claims that COVID doesn’t even exist, someone who claims to have had it would clearly be a liar.

Worse, to someone who knows it exists but has a vested interest in pretending it doesn’t, someone who claims to have had it is evidence that the denier is a liar.

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Ah, I can see your point. What I meant was that some covid shamers may be covid-prevention enthusiasts who assume that covid victims brought it on themselves by being maskholes or deniers etc.

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I don’t think that’s how people work. I think COVID deniers would love a data point that COVID isn’t that bad (the people hiding it aren’t the ones who went to the hospital) and even if someone did go, they can rationalize that away (it wasn’t really COVID; the doctors just put them into the hospital for profit).

The people that will be judgmental about someone else getting COVID are the people who believe that as long as they do everything right, they are safe–people who are hoping that their good choices can exert control over a terrible situation. And this is really complicated, because of course taking precautions do make you safer, but they don’t make you safe. And even highly risk-adverse people are making cost/benefit analysis, so even those of us who are very risk adverse almost certainly have some risky behaviors that someone else could point at and say “See! You were lazy! You were selfish! You were careless! That would never happen to me”. I think it’s fear of that reaction that makes people ashamed.