A friend in Canada posted this helpful table, which I think may have originated in Canada, too: Nothing justifies
being rude
to others!
I guess we don't actually know how lethal Corona is, but given how far it's likely to have spread already (five million people left Wuhan before the quarantine, and WHO expects it will prove a global pandemic), it's looking much milder than SARS, MERS, etc. That hasn't prevented panicked overreactions, from the quarantining of tens of millions of people in Hubei by a Chinese government fighting for a credibility it has already lost to the attempted quarantining of the whole country by other governments, like our own, through travel warnings, flight suspensions and barring access to any non-citizen who's been anywhere in China recently. By now hundreds of millions of people are affected by the hysteria, if not by the virus, and the hysteria is likely to have a higher cost in lives lost and disrupted than the virus, too.
Easy to say, I suppose, from the safety of February in New York. I wasn't as calmly rational a week ago. We were in China as the virus was starting to make the news, and Nanjing (where we spent the nights of January 12th and 13th) isn't that far from Wuhan by high speed train - a mere 500km! At one point, twelve days after coming home, the media frenzy gave me the panicked idea that I could be a carrier - not everyone has symptoms right away - and I thought of all the people I might have unwittingly infected at school, at church, on public transportation, at the birthday party for a 1-year-old, and at a Broadway show called, of all things, "The Inheritance."
It's nonsense, of course. Everyone's fine, and so am I. But I'm jittery nonetheless, and still quickly change the subject when people ask what I did over the winter break. Were I in China I don't know that I wouldn't be barricaded in my room, swathed in face masks and laminated in antibiotic hand sanitizers, jumping at the tiniest hint of a cough or sniffle - my own or another's - and obsessively feeling my forehead for potential fever. Imagine the creeping dread of an entire nation in suspended animation, afraid to believe anything it hears.
So I can't blame people for overreacting, but I can regret how overreaction-prone most of us human beings are, and can marvel at those who find ways of getting calmly on with their lives. (Would I be able to be one of them? Perhaps going to Beijing to teach again this summer would count; I went to Japan after Fukushima in part to show solidarity with my friends there.) So deep the spreading harm. I can feel understandable worry morphing with anti-Chinese sentiments, entwined with scary fantasies of decoupling China from the world. I can feel the resonance between the argument given for quarantining Wuhan and the rationale contrived for the internment of a million Uighurs in Xinjiang. I know how hard it will be to dial back these overreactions, fueled as they already are by more than medical concerns.
Let's hope the virus soon proves to be mostly bark and little bite, and that the waves of relief at this discovery will help heal some of the ruptures our frenzied first reactions to it have caused. Nothing justifies being rude to others. To have friends come from faraway places, is it not a joy? (Analects 1: 有朋自遠方來，不亦樂乎？)
