Covid-19, the new coronavirus from China recently arrived in the United States has already transformed our personal worlds. A metro post is now a memento mori. An itchy eye is a trap. A cough is a warning sign.
And in New York, which recognized its first case of Covid-19 on Sunday (and has confirmed several others since), everyone cough. At least that’s what Ezra Butler seems. The other night, the 38-year-old consultant found himself surrounded by sneezing in a Broadway theater. He sees people coughing in the street and sniffing in the subway.
“I’m going to hold my breath, and the second we get to the station, I’m going to change cars,” he said.
Coronavirus symptom: shortness of breath.
Coronavirus anxiety symptom: shortness of breath.
Butler also experienced unexpected respiratory disturbances, but not due to a virus. He says that thinking of all the possible ways to catch the coronavirus while on the move has given him several “micro-panic attacks.” “I can’t think. I freeze. I can’t concentrate. My breathing changes,” he says. “And my whole body tells me, ‘Get out.'”
As if there was enough to worry about.
“For some people, it can be the stress that rocks them,” said Lynn Bufka, clinical psychologist and senior director of practice, research and policy at the American Psychological Association. “For the public, this is very new. We don’t know much about it. The information on this subject keeps changing. . . . This is what stresses us: new but uncertain things. “
Coronavirus anxiety has overtaken the virus itself. Convenience store shelves were flooded with hand sanitizer. Surgical masks ditto. Health officials have chastised the panicked Americans who buy the masks, saying that they are not useful if you are not already sick and that their hoarding can keep them out of the hands of those who need them. (“Seriously people – STOP BUYING MASKS!” tweeted the American general surgeon on Saturday.)
Coronavirus symptom: cough.
Coronavirus anxiety symptom: panic.
“Everything is disgusting for me now, ”says Pandora Orr, 36.
Orr lives in Chicago, which has yet to see an outbreak of confirmed cases. If she puts her lunch bag on the counter at work, she must clean the bottom. She wipes her laptop every time she has to take her to another room for meetings.
“While I’m talking to you in this conference room, my elbows are on this desk,” she said earlier, considering that they too should be purged. “I feel like I’m going a little crazy.”
It was in the middle of a trip to London, Brussels and Paris last week that Erin Fogerty, 23, realized that returning to Seattle would be no safer than being abroad. Washington State has the most confirmed cases in the country, with at least 28 confirmed patients and nine deaths. (In general, the World Health Organization says that about 3.4% of those diagnosed with the disease have died.)
“If I don’t think about it, I’m fine, but when you start thinking about those big crazy germs,” it can quickly degenerate into obsession, she says. “When I touch door handles and elevators, this kind of thing scares me very much.”
Coronavirus symptom: fever.
Symptom of anxiety due to coronaviruses: disorientate the awareness that each surface is full of microorganisms.
Nikhil Merchant, 38, carefully wiped the treadmill from his Los Angeles suburban gym before using it. “Your senses are heightened to sort of superimpose germs sitting on this machine,” he says.
The merchant had completed the ritual on Monday and was about to start his run when he spotted a sheaf of chewing gum in the treadmill cell phone pocket and briefly fled the gym in overwhelming mysophobic disgust.
“I almost got home, and I had to rethink, why am I so paranoid?” he says. In the end, he finished his training.
The suspicion of treadmills and elevators turns into suspicion of others: do other people wash their hands for two happy birthdays? How much do I owe really know the habits and history of all those friends, colleagues and strangers who touch all the things I touch just before I forget do not touch my face?
During a cooking class in Boston last week, Rodrigo Martinez, 47, realized that the whole class would touch the ravioli dough during the lesson, and he couldn’t help but wonder if the one of his comrades had recently spent time in China. On Long Island, Randy Foss, 74, killed his weekly mah-jongg group after thinking a little too long about how everyone should touch the tiles used to play the game.
Melanie Dahlberg, 62, who lives in Renton, Washington, half an hour away from the Kirkland Coronavirus hotspot, failed to convince her adult son and daughter that she had no illness after coming down with nausea and fever on Sunday.
“I said,” I’m fine. It’s like the flu I’ve had my whole life. Let me suffer in misery, “said Dahlberg.
Dahlberg went to the emergency room and waited two hours alone before a doctor sent her home with a note to reassure her children: she had a regular flu.
In San Antonio, the archdiocese has issued a recommendation to churches to remove holy water from church entrances; many Catholics dip their fingers in water to mark themselves with the sign of the cross.
On a Royal Caribbean “Star Trek” themed cruise that left Miami on Sunday, signs on board read “Vulcan salutes or elbows only”.
Anna Vagnerini, a 30-year-old marketer in Charlotte, went to Whole Foods the other day to pick up fancy sparkling water and coconut shrimp, but when she saw the shelves crammed with canned goods, she decided to get frozen broccoli, cannellini peppers and beans too.
The ambiance in Charlotte reminded Vagnerini of the days of calm weather leading to a hurricane – the discordant dissonance between the sunny weather outside and the low-intensity electric current of panic crackling in the air – “it’s that looming little fear, because you don’t know what’s going to go wrong, and that’s all we talk about. (One case was reported in Raleigh, 2 and a half hours’ drive away.)
The imminent fear is not small for the elderly of a generation or two, who may be more vulnerable to Covid-19, says Jameca Falconer, psychologist in St. Louis.
“DON’T DO THIS,” Brown immediately texted his grandmother, who ultimately backed away from the idea. (Aside from the nose, centers for disease control and prevention do not list neosporin as a treatment for coronaviruses.)
Min Pummalee, a 26-year-old graduate student in the district, told her parents not to fly from Thailand to attend her graduation ceremony in May because their flight was booked on Korean Air, and she was afraid of fall ill or be in quarantine, which would be difficult for his pre-diabetic father to manage.
Meanwhile, Pummalee is desperately trying to stop touching his face. She knows that surgical masks don’t help, but she has to wear one anyway on the subway anyway, she says, because “if I touch the mask instead of my own face, it will be better.”
She does not trust the people around her to wash their hands.
She doesn’t trust herself.
She doesn’t even trust the chemicals in her hand sanitizer.
“I know it’s like 99.9%“ effective, she says. “But I think, what’s going on with that 0.1%?”