My Thoughts on the Coronavirus: 4. The Dark Side

Our Inability to Evaluate Probability and Risk

In Part 2 of this series, I’ve discussed our inability to understand exponential processes. Today, we will discuss another deficit of our brain.

OK, let’s go dark! You’ve been warned. So if you can’t handle controversy, you should leave.

The general public is often fearful of viruses with a high mortality rate, like Ebola with 88% fatality. From an individual’s standpoint, these diseases are scary. But they rarely wipe out a huge population, because the dead can’t infect others unless physically contacted, and most people usually don’t come into direct physical contact with the dead.

We all know from experience that pest sprays that kill ants upon contact (i.e. 100% mortality rate) are not the most effective. Few weeks after we apply these sprays, the ants come back, because their colony is unaffected. What’s more effective is slow-acting bait that ants don’t recognize as poison, carry back to the nest, and share it within the colony. This bait might take weeks or longer and probably has a lower mortality rate, but they can eventually wipe out a huge part of the colony.

Covid19 is precisely such bait, and I am much more fearful of such a moderately deadly disease that is highly transmissible asymptomatically. Because we can’t recognize the vector of transmission, it can decimate the population if we simply wait long enough. Likewise, I am most fearful of the long-term side effects of the coronavirus. They act gradually and may not even be deadly, but they will eventually eat away our humanity. 

A Virus of the Mind

Even if you are not infected with Covid19, the uncertainties created by this pandemic is already stressful. Prolonged lockdown is impacting our psychological and mental health in addition to our physical health. Limited social interaction creates a sense of disconnectedness, loneliness, boredom, and helplessness. Increase levels of anxiety, home violence, and even suicidal tendency are just some of these reported side effects.

Now, imagine someone who is fighting Covid19 and is required to self-quarantine at home. He must isolate himself from his immediate family when he needs them most in fear of infecting them. What if he has children who need his care. What if the children are young and can’t make sense of the sudden lack of contact or attention with their parent(s). And what if someone close to you is lost to this fight.

Such disruption to the basic unit of our society will have long-term societal consequences, because people will naturally look for a scapegoat. And I must say that President Trump has set a very bad example as a leader by calling Covid19 the “Chinese virus.” It is an irresponsible act that creates xenophobia and has already instigated multiple hate crimes against Asian Americans. Trump has subsequently stopped using this racist label. However, just as you can’t unsee what you’ve seen, it’s hard to unlearn an idea (especially when it’s a convenient scapegoat) once it has infected people’s minds.

Despite my disagreement with Trump, it doesn’t mean I disagree with the fact that this pandemic started in China. There are genetic lineage data that trace the genetic variants of cases in Europe (yellow/green) and North America (orange/red) back to an ancestral strain from China (purple). But a viral outbreak can start anywhere in the world. A virus is opportunistic and will take advantage of anything and everything in its environment to survive and propagate. In this perspective, if we humans continue to exploit our environment, destroy habitats, and live irrespective of the health of our planet, then we are not so different from a virus to this planet.

My Greatest Fear and Why

A viral pandemic in the information age is often accompanied by an information pandemic (infodemic). Because Covid19 is an ongoing threat that has created much uncertainty, it’s a prime target for the spread of misinformation through social media, which is identical to the spread of a virus in the physical world. This infodemic is far more dangerous than the pandemic itself. Keep in mind that the reason Covid19 has spread globally to its current state is precisely because of the misinformation disseminated by the WHO.

Today, there are many Covid19 conspiracy theories out there. Did the US Army bring the coronavirus to China? Did the Chinese government under-reported the total coronavirus case? If not, could Covid19 be a biological weapon engineered with preferential transmission among certain race or ethnicity? I really hope none of these are true, but there are no simple and effective means to tell fact from fiction in the digital age. You can literally find anything on the internet.

We are all susceptible to political propaganda whether we like it or not. Our long-held belief that we are intelligent, rational, independent freethinkers is way overrated. We are not as rational as we thought. In fact, we are so irrational that we are predictably irrational, according to Dan Ariely. Through my 10 years of work in behavioral economics and gamification, I have evidence long ago that humans are easily influenced and can be easily programmed under the right conditions. And Cambridge Analytica confirmed this at the scale of nations by manipulating voters through misinformation.

Just as we are inherently terrible at evaluating risks, estimating exponential processes, we are also oblivious of our susceptibility to an infodemic.

“We are blind to our blindness”

— Daniel Kahneman.

OK... Stay home, stay healthy, and stay tuned in. We'll look at the bright side next time, and have a wonderful Easter weekend.

This article is part of a series, if you miss the previous installments, they are linked below.

1. Making Sense of the Reality
2. The Immediate Urgency
3. Socioeconomic Side Effect