Coronavirus Fragments 5: The Toll on the Public

Coronavirus outbreak: House Foreign Affairs, CDC speak on COVID-19 response (27 February 2020). Video Source: Youtube.

The CDC made a statement today, in which they mainly focused on funding and logistics - and controlling information about the novel coronavirus. Authorities' insistence on dominating the narrative is creating a divided public.

Below, see a thread of responses under a Youtube video posted today. They show how the public is split in countries where the coronavirus has yet to take hold. Blue-pilled people unquestioningly believe the authorities and the mainstream media; they blindly think that the virus is just the flu. Meanwhile, red-pilled people who follow the alternative media think that we are facing the apocalypse; they have been prepping. The comments listed here are from the latter group.

• "It's just confirmed in the Netherlands in my city in Tilburg! :("
• "My anxiety and introversion have been preparing me my whole life for this."
• "I've been a respiratory therapist since 1998 and I can tell you few of any hospitals have more than a handful of Airborne isolation rooms. In my California career I've worked 38 different facilities regular employment and registry between acute hospitals, Ltac, skilled nursing facilities with Subacute units. This virus is going to cut through the United States like butter. You better prepare with stocking up with at least 6 months of food or more and pray the government is able to keep the power and water going. You have been warned!"
• "ya my little brother eating food non stop all day everyday. my parents havnt said much and all my friends making fun of it on facebook laughing it off. the first wave will be the comfortable. they are the ones that cant be trusted. when time comes they will take your food that you prepped yourself after they ignored your warnings"
• "My dear old mom who has lived her whole life through some of America's best years (born in the 50s) refuses to accept that this is serious. Gets very emotional when I suggest her and my dad stock up a little...and dad just flew to a conference. Begged him not to since its not super important. Nope. Now I feel I must cut them off for a couple weeks from my wife and kids. Who said the millenials are the ones with their heads in the sand?"
• "I have no idea how to share this with my father. If he gets sick there is a very high chance he will die from this. He has had three heart attacks."
• "When I noticed the gargantuan moves China was making on 23 Jan., I began telling my relatives they ought to watch out for this and maybe do some prepping. They all thought I was Chicken Little."
• "Yes. I just had that experience today, now that the news broke through last night in USA on the national and cable channels. I was trying to warn my elderly immune compromised friends. But they got very techy and irritable with me saying 'it's just a flu'! The American people have been brainwashed for 2 months now to think this way. And it continues. This is going to get very ugly in the USA."
• "I just didn't even try after the first time of warning them and they acted like I was crazy and overreacting. I thought to myself, fine, your loss. I'm not saying a word anymore and I'll just act stupid like them so they'll think I'm in the same situation as they will be when chaos begins. At least that way they won't come to me expecting help because they'll think I'm bad off too. To me that's better than having to threaten my own relatives. So no one knows I've been stocking up and I'm ready. I started the first week in January way before masks and etc started disappearing from store shelves. Sounds awful but I'm elderly and to a lot of people the elderly are dispensable. Who cares about old people. Less and less every year. Too bad because they'll be old one day too. 😏💔"
• "I have the exact same problem. The love of my life is pissed off with me saying that I'm panacing because I want to buy some essentials, meanwhile her stance is do nothing at all. I'm thinking I have to just do it and hide it from her for her own protection."
• "When Sandy hit we couldn't buy gas or diesel for 2 weeks, it just couldn't get through. Luckily I had prepared four 55 gallon drums of diesel before the storm. Mine was the only truck left running in the whole neghborhood by the second week. When one station did get fuel I saw the most bizarre thing - not cars lined up, but people with gas cans, a line of people with gas cans - over 100 people as far as the eye could see. They needed the fuel for their emergency generators which had run dry. They carried the cans or pulled them on wagons. It was like we had gone back to the 18th century. There was no electricity, no cars, no fuel, and nearly all the stores were closed. Glad I was prepared."
• "In Finland: ~ 'Trust the authorities, we're doing everything that's needed, don't waste money on masks, stop spreading rumors and hysteria, don't buy more food than normal, it's just a flu, just keep washing your hands and be vigilant around other people. The people in white coats know everything, listen to them.' Passengers from Italy were let straight through from a flight, one later confirmed to be the second known Covid-19 case. It's just common sense to prepare, but you get branded hysterical."
• "same thing in Sweden but even worse I think. They’re feeding us disinformation here as well. At first it couldn’t get here, then it was it can’t spread here and so on."
• "Same in Ireland, I’ve started to stock up on food & everybody says oh stop panicking, so NO I’m not panicking I’m fucking preparing! Why can’t people see this"
• "listen, take it from me, just stop telling people you're preparing. First they will keep mocking you. And second the more people that know you have prepared the more people will come to you for help when things turn chaotic. Don't say anything anymore. The time of convincing is over. Protect yourself. It's going to get nasty out there. Stay calm, prepare for the worse and hope for the best. If you need someone to talk to about this just keep coming to these videos and share your thoughts with others like you. Don't keep it bottled up inside. Do what your gut is telling you to do. You'll be okay. 👍👩‍🦳"
• "It makes me feel like i am in a bad end of the world sci-fi virus 🦠 movie .."
• "I’m a security guard right now, I deal with everyone and touch thousands of doors. My dad is immunosuppressed— I’m so scared"
• "I work in a warehouse and handle literally 100s of packages a day from all over the world- no one wears any protection..no one seems concerned- I'm personally terrified"

This divided population - between prepped and not prepped - is the direct result of disinformation or downplayed information from mainstream information sources. Of course, the public was already divided between blue pills and red pills. The awakening of red pills depended on their level of engagement with Internet (dis)information which has been circulating for the past twenty years. The less you dug around on the Internet in that period, and the less you engaged with alternative information there, the more dated and conventional your view of current authorities will be.

Obviously, officials played down the severity of the initial coronavirus epidemic to prevent panic and to protect the economy. This has, however, created a more dangerous potential situation. If the coronavirus hits other countries as hard as it hit China, the people who have not prepared will realize the seriousness of the crisis too late, and this will be a source of unrest, violence, and raiding. It would have been better to be truthful from the beginning and not label telling the truth as 'panic' and 'fear-mongering.'

There are individuals who are part of the authoritative structure but who are also individual citizens. Their reality is torn between the authority they uphold and the mainstream message they must relay - and their private truth. I do wonder if people working in authoritative positions - from government, education, medicine, the police - have been misled by their superiors with regard to how bad things will be, so that they will continue to show up at their posts. Medics in affected areas in China are infected and dying. 29 per cent of infections in Wuhan were medical staff.

On the impact of censorship, consider the official silencing of the suspicion that the virus leaked from a lab. Whether you dismiss that as a conspiracy theory or not, imagine what it would mean about the whole world if that is the real nature of what we are facing. By blanket-denying a lab source for the virus, the MSM have blocked the possibility of getting to the bottom of how this epidemic may have started. Note that on 21 February 2020, Chinese leader Xi Jinping ordered a review and strengthening of biosecurity measures in microbiology research labs.

The problem with the use of authoritative disinformation about the seriousness of the virus is that citizens then do not know what they are really confronting. Their panic still comes, but it comes later, and is much worse.

That said, for nay-sayers, there is no excuse for ignorance if you watched the footage that came out of China over a four week period from mid-January to mid-February 2020 and saw Hubei province devolve from a normally functioning society into a crisis zone. There is a real mental disconnect if you see that and don't understand that it will happen elsewhere, across a similar time frame.

If you want to consider the human dimensions of how pandemics affect groups of people, you may want to watch the highly-acclaimed South Korean zombie pandemic film, Train to Busan (2016; here, while the link lasts).


See all my posts on Epidemics here and here.