Don’t get trapped in virus denialism… it can kill you

Last week, the Lotriet family smiled about the coronavirus. Not this week.

The lovely Snapdragon, who handles public relations for a big private hospital group, experiences the panic around the disease daily.

Not that I need her anecdotes to see the terror that has been surrounding me for the past week. Terrified social media posts and the empty supermarket shelves take care of this.

Fear is not necessarily a bad thing, Snapdragon assures me. According to her, our reaction to any threat has been programmed into our DNA, whether it’s a lion roaring in the bushes ahead of us or an invisible virus.

A string of biological coding somewhere in our brains forces us to react immediately to anything that threatens our survival or the survival of the species. It’s the only way we can feel in control.

But the moment emotions begin to override logical thinking, healthy fear turns into panic and we try to outrun the lion. Or buy all the toilet paper and hand sanitiser we can lay our virus-riddled hands on.

A rational person will understand that you want the people around you to have facial masks and sanitisers and whatever helps to contain the virus. If you create a situation where others can’t access these essentials, you’re increasing the probability that they’ll infect you.

But that’s rhetoric – in coronavirus South Africa, rational thought is as rare as a roll of that white gold on a shop shelf.

Instead, fake news abounds. Covid-19 was man-made and studied in Wuhan and North Carolina in 2015, some whisper.

But simply gargle with bicarbonate of soda and swallow garlic every day. That will kill the virus.

If you really want to kill it – it’s harmless, because seasonal flu kills many more people than the coronavirus, a woman told me on Facebook yesterday.

“More people die in bed than of ebola, pancreatic cancer and smallpox combined. Does that mean beds are more dangerous than those diseases?” I asked. She still hasn’t answered.

Please guard against panic. And don’t embrace fake news and pseudo science. A decade and a half ago, South Africans were encouraged to take beetroot and garlic as a cure for Aids. This denialist ignorance killed 300,000 people. Let’s not be caught in that trap again.

Dirk Lotriet.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.