Wuhan Coronavirus Is An Information Plague

It’s winter in Hong Kong, so to keep warm we sleep with peel-off heating stickers that we put at the foot of the bed. They are surprisingly effective, and I recommend them. The night passes by calmly and the sleep is deep.

Winter is always a time when things feel more fragile. It’s often a time when people get sick. Having a global pandemic growing at your doorstep really heightens the dread.

We all fear the invisible, I think. We know from experience that it’s the things we cannot see that harm us; the things we cannot expect that startle us into new ways of living or not living.

We do things to comfort ourselves. We watch the news. Having terms put to us in black and white — seeing a reality — enables us to build some kind of tenuous grasp of reality, and use it to make our choices.

These stories and actions are our sources for truth.

In some communities, this storytelling is reliable. In other communities, it’s a story that is more about an idea or a desire than it is about what is actually happening.

A mythology, usually in a time when we need real answers.

In some cases, even worse, it’s a startling and stern directive to live a certain way.

Last night, Sarah was peeling antiseptic towelettes from a baking tray. I thought she was making her own sanitary masks. I was close. She was soaking them to create her own anti-germ lotion for applying while on the bus or when we go out to eat.

Suddenly, I was reminded of preppers, the apocalyptic paranoiacs that you see on the Discovery Channel, who store munitions and cans of beans in a tunnel under their yard, along with 500 gallons of purified water, and oxygen tanks.

When you have a pharmaceutical chemist in the house, improvisation is key. But I never thought the store shelves in a market-driven economy, which is supposed to be efficient and answerable to all consumer desires, would be driven bare by panic and fear.

Yet, here we are. Grocery stores and pharmacies, which were first slammed daily and nightly by long lines of people looking for surgical masks — which don’t really even help you if you are not sick — are now thronged by mostly older people buying all the rice, toilet paper and, really, anything they can get their hands on, to guard agains… what, exactly?

I’ll get to that.

In this whole ordeal of self-quarantine, border closings, and the political battle of wills, the most damaging to the public order is the incredible amount of misinformation that is flying around.

People just don’t trust the local government. They also barely really pay attention to what they do see on the news. They rely mostly on what their friends are telling them on the ground in personal text messages and chat groups.

It’s not just in Hong Kong.

I listen to an America-based trading group online every night and usually in the morning, and it’s interesting to listen to them forecast the number of deaths they think coronavirus will create in China.

They do this because, as a group, they believe everything they are seeing on the news is false.

That in itself is slightly morbid. What’s more horrifying, though, is that even as they doubt any of the information they see on the news, they rapidly and rampantly share many news articles, videos or photos, but they have no idea what they are sharing.

The level of media literacy is very low.

These people are making trading and investing decisions?

If you send around a photo that you are pretty sure confirms that the illness is worse than the media is letting on, then you had better have a source for your information, and at least know what city or what country the photo comes from. They can’t source any of it.

They share a photo of a man in a plastic tube — a precautionary method they are using in China to transport bed-ridden patients to hospitals. One or two of them are convinced that this means the disease is actually a bio-weapon that got out of control.

“Why would the military be involved in the effort, then, tell me that!”

Lack of media literacy. And a real unfamiliarity with Asia and world events, in general.

My gut tells me that if these amateur traders are this bad, maybe some professionals are just as bad. Also, if these so-called shrewd traders are this worked up, imagine what poor families are like in their homes in Wuhan. All day, cramped in their home. Only one individual is allowed to go outside to forage at the supermarket every three days.

Wildly, in other provinces, it’s been reported that based on rumor alone, police are banning people from going outside and locking some people in their homes, in Hangzhou and in some Western provinces.

The distance from the source leads to large leaps of logic locally.

These leaps in logic we tend to make from flashes of news alerts online are surprising.

In many ways, as a reader of news, and as a former journalist, I feel I have a leg up. I at least doubt 90% of what I see, and hours later, it’s confirmed that it was just a rumor.

This isn’t the fault of technology. Technology should make us smarter. I think the problem is how we relate to each other.

In general, I think, as humans, we are just really bad at listening, reading between the lines and relating to each other, intimately.

We make our own antiseptic fluid at home. My wife’s mother and father have quarantine cases in their neighborhood. We have cases in ours.

Sarah and I talk to each other all day. We haven’t been around each other for over four months, because I mostly work in Taiwan.

It’s special how you can sit around someone for an entire day, and not speak much, but the familiarity resurfaces. You begin to laugh out loud at silly things. You begin to appreciate again why you love this person.

It’s in the micro-expressions. It’s in the murmurs and the “hmmmms” when they think aloud (okay, when I talk out loud, complaining about the news).

I feel like so much of this illness isn’t just a virus that emerged from cross-species contamination. It’s an information plague that arose from the inability to share the truth with each other. And when one man, and seven others, tried to do so, they were stopped.

In fact, even more sadly, the first doctor who began the warning and alerted other doctors in China about the new coronavirus has died, after being arrested and “educated” on the spreading of rumours by local police.

For me this long narrative unfolding in China and now the rest of the world is really one about information and power.

Knowledge is magical and power-producing.

Communities that share knowledge are strong, and they are able to influence local events and even global events.

Measures would have been put in place far earlier. And doctors, who rightfully should be the first to blow the whistle, would have saved more people.

But that’s not how it works in some governments.

Some powers that be deeply deeply fear the magic of knowledge and the use of language to connect and empower.

Control and discipline are more important than public safety and knowledge-sharing.

We seem to have learned nothing from SARS. The WHO has been praising China for weeks for their ability to fight this.

They are so short-sighted. Had China’s provincial and city authorities in Hubei province and Wuhan not been so paranoid about losing reputation points, or harming their own provincial numbers, local doctors and global health authorities would have had a one-month lead time to fight this.

Press conferences and loudspeaker directives, which are broadcast in some cities in China 24 hours a day are a moot point.

This is for me the most dangerous aspect of global politics and trade. We are only as strong as our weakest, most secretly held links.

The world deserves more openness. Maybe then we could all live less in the throes of illness and suspicion and more in allegiance and unity with others.

The severe imposition of order creates disorder. It causes good people to act poorly. It causes open governments to close in on themselves and act defensively, even harshly towards others. The projection of power is itself a type of illness that is only nurtured by the refusal to intimately connect people to knowledge or levers of their own local empowerment.

To me this virus is a warning. Left unchecked, ego and secrecy spread rampantly among people, and it leads to disaster.

This is true for China and true for America. It is true for any community built around imagination and life experience.

Otherwise, life is lip service. And living in secret carries with it a huge cost to human life.

As an existentialist, all I will say in close is that all of us need each other. We are all we have.

We are all we have.