Responding faithfully to the Coronavirus
In the US, according to a recent survey, 38% of citizens would non buy a Corona beer considering of concern about the Coronavirus. (It is probably not true, but it is still not good news for the Mexican brand.) More seriously, fears about the virus have led to ' political and economic instability… xenophobia and racism confronting people of Chinese and Due east Asian descent, and the spread of misinformation near the virus, primarily online.
And then information technology is peradventure worth offering some sobering reflection, from a medical, psychological, historical and theological betoken of view.
Medical:Dr Fiona Caput writes:
As a Christian doctor and public health medic I take been watching the church response to the coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak with some business. As y'all might expect, professionally, and more importantly personally, I am no stranger to infectious disease. Historically, over the ages, caring for people has always involved personal run a risk. At the offset of my medical training at an old, established London Medical School, we were ushered into an ancient lecture theatre and told starkly that had we been sitting at that place 100 years ago a third of us would have been expressionless from TB before we qualified as doctors.
Equally it happened, by the time I had qualified and returned to work in the same hospital as a junior I had contracted TB—source uncertain, but most probably through exposure every bit a medical pupil. I went on to needlestick myself with blood from a highly infectious hepatitis patient, expose myself to measles whilst significant (the baby was fine) and I nonetheless at times develop viral infections that I suspect (but tin can't prove) are related to patients I have seen in my GP work.
It'due south a fact of life. People go sick. Sickness is often caused by bugs. If you spend fourth dimension with people you lot may well catch their bugs every bit well. The more you care for people the more you are at risk of getting bugs.
We should plainly try to reduce the take a chance of infection. It's of import to protect people as far equally humanly possible from the various risks they face as they get well-nigh their daily concern.But each morn on my way to work I cycle past a movie of Li Wenliang on the pavement. Local Chinese people accept surrounded his photo with flowers. Li Wenliang was a Christian, and a doctor. He died as a result of caring for people. What does existence a Christian mean for each of usa in this situation?
To be quite honest I find that the Church of England communication on coronavirus, issued initially on 13th Feb and revised on Tuesday (3rd March), is wide of the marker. A search on the (admittedly very small-scale) academic literature on infection risks associated with communion reveals only one good study where the actual differences between sipping from a common cup and intinction are assessed in terms of the resultant microbial load. Whilst the run a risk of infection passing from person to person through sharing a common cup is very low overall, not surprisingly intinction produced less microbial load than sipping. I say "not surprisingly" as it is a much shorter pathway for a bug to hop from chest to spit to communion cup than for a bug to hop chest-spit-hands-bread-cup. The advice to avert intinction as a way to reduce infection makes little scientific sense to me.
However, by focussing on decreased personal take chances through an emphasis on the mode of communion we miss the point. The NHS is planning and preparing at speed for coronavirus but I am not hearing plans from our church building on how to scale upward our intendance for those who are already vulnerable, the elderly and the sick – the people who will be disproportionately afflicted past this virus.
I listened today to the Chief Scientific Adviser in a printing conference with the Prime number Minister exhorting united states of america that "central to this we protect the vulnerable". And the Chief Medical Officer encouraging national "extraordinary outbreaks of altruism".
If I am hearing that from my secular leaders, why I am not hearing that from my church? Caring for people always involves risk. As we prepare for more cases of coronavirus, as a church do we need to re-examine our priorities?
Psychological: Dr Samuel Paul Veissière offered this challenging reflection on the real impact of the virus in Psychology Today.
Ask yourself the following: Would yous feel confident taking an over-the-counter medication if you were 98 per centum sure information technology would work safely? Would yous dare to gamble all your savings in a one-off scheme in which y'all had a 98 percent adventure of losing it all?
The coronavirus is a similar no-brainer. Equally a generic member of the human being species, you have nearly the aforementioned odds of dying of the coronavirus as winning in the gambling scenario. These are overall rates, meaning that unless you are already in very poor health, are very onetime, or very young, the odds for you are much lower. Or next to nothing.
Why and so are so many countries implementing quarantine measures, shutting downwardly their borders, schools, and soccer games for something that is less likely to happen to anyone than drowning in a single year, or even beingness striking by lightning in one'south lifetime? Why is the stock-market crashing, and why are school and workplace mass emails, news headlines, social media feeds, and contiguous conversations dominated by stories about what is substantially a new strand of balmy to moderate flu?
Our minds like to spring to threatening headlines with big, alarming numbers. Every bit this post was outset aired, a total of 80,000 cases of COVID-19 had been reported in forty countries. To put things in perspective again, this is a mere 0.0001% of the earth population. In comparison, seasonal outbreaks of influenza make 3 to 5 million people sick plenty to seek treatment worldwide (up to 0.06% of the population) while many more cases go undetected. The seasonal flu results in 290,000 to 650,000 deaths each year — up to 0.008% of the population.
To grasp the full — and very real — power of the coronavirus, we need to enter the rabbit hole of evolved human psychology.
The coronavirus is quite simply, and almost exclusively, a moral panic. This is so in the most literal sense. Human bodies, minds, societies, systems of meaning, norms, and morality have co-evolved with pathogens. Determining who drove whom in this dark scenario is currently unclear.
To understand this foreign dynamic, consider people's breathy inability to brand statistically correct inferences nearly actual gamble in the current epidemic of catastrophizing near COVID-19. The human being propensity to ignore basic probability, and our mind's fondness for attention to 'salient' data is well-documented. The negativity bias is one of the most potent of such pre-programmed mental heuristics: Whatsoever cue that contains information about potential dangers and threats volition jump to heed hands, will be easier to remember, and easier to pass on. In the lingo of cultural epidemiologists, we depict danger cues every bit possessing "high learnability, memorability, and teachability" — or high feed-forwards potential in epidemics of ideas. There is a clear evolutionary advantage to this trait: We are meliorate off over-interpreting rather than under-interpreting danger. In nearly cases, these instant associations piece of work well. Cues that signal the presence of pathogens tend to elicit automatic disgust responses, and so as to help us avoid dangers. Over fourth dimension, we've also evolved the ability to react instantly to a range of visual and auditory cues that convey a high likelihood of pathogen presence. This is why nigh of us are grossed out by the presence of mice, rats, or bugs, or by the sound of sniffling…
The bad news for you is that, if you lot live in a densely populated area, you are very probable to contract the coronavirus — if not this year, next year, or the year after as it undergoes its seasonal global migration design with its zoonotic cousins.
The good news is that you will almost certainly not dice from information technology, and it may not fifty-fifty register that you are slightly more than sluggish than usual for a calendar week or two. Much more than relevant to the terrible threat caused by our Pathogen Overlords, you can prepare to fight the yearly Corona invasions to come past resisting your own neuroticism, your own prejudice, and your ain irrationality. As far as numbers games are concerned, our Pathogen Overlords are much more noble, and much more worthy of our hatred than our fellow human pseudo-enemies in political, religious, and civilisation wars.
Historical: Candida Moss notes, in a 2022 article at CNN, the impact of plagues in the tertiary-century Roman Empire.
Cyprian, the mid-third century bishop of Carthage, provides united states with the most detailed description of the plague's terrible effects. In his essay "De mortalitate" ("On Mortality"), Cyprian wrote:
"The intestines are shaken with a continual vomiting; the eyes are on burn down with the infected blood; that in some cases the feet or some parts of the limbs are taken off past the contamination of diseased putrefaction."
In many cases, Cyprian went on to say, blindness and deafness would ensue.
At its height the epidemic is estimated to have killed 5,000 people a twenty-four hour period in the city of Rome alone. Among them were two Roman emperors: Hostilian and Claudius II Gothic. The effects were just every bit extreme elsewhere in the empire. Sociologist Rodney Stark writes that every bit much as two-thirds of the population in Alexandria, Egypt, died.
Modern scientists may believe that the disease was smallpox, but to Cyprian it was a portent of the cease of the world. Interestingly, this belief may have actually helped the spread of Christianity. Cyprian noted that Christians were besides dying from the plague, merely suggested that just not-Christians had annihilation to fright.
[In fact, Rodney Stark goes on to summate the impact of plagues on the growth of Christian faith. Non but were pagans impressed past their backbone and care, but Christians who got the plague were more likely to survive because their Christian relatives and friends stayed and cared for them, whilst pagans were abandoned.]
Theological: Church historian Eusebius recalls the response of Christians to the two plagues in Rome, according to the account of Dionysius:
The about of our brethren were unsparing in their exceeding dear and brotherly kindness. They held fast to each other and visited the sick fearlessly, and ministered to them continually, serving them in Christ. And they died with them most joyfully, taking the affliction of others, and drawing the sickness from their neighbors to themselves and willingly receiving their pains. And many who cared for the sick and gave strength to others died themselves having transferred to themselves their death.
Truly the best of our brethren departed from life in this manner, including some presbyters and deacons and those of the people who had the highest reputation; then that this form of death, through the great piety and strong faith information technology exhibited, seemed to lack nil of martyrdom.
And they took the bodies of the saints in their open hands and in their bosoms, and closed their eyes and their mouths; and they diameter them away on their shoulders and laid them out; and they clung to them and embraced them; and they prepared them suitably with washings and garments. And later a little they received like treatment themselves, for the survivors were continually following those who had gone before them.
Simply with the infidel everything was quite otherwise. They deserted those who began to be sick, and fled from their dearest friends. They shunned any participation or fellowship with death; which all the same, with all their precautions, it was non easy for them to escape.
Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. 7.22.7-ten
So how should we answer? Wash your hands, and recite the Lord's Prayer as yous do (it is better than singing 'Happy birthday' twice). Trust in God, care for the ill, and share your hope of life beyond death. Remember Ps 91:
Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most Loftier will residue in the shadow of the Almighty.
They say of the LORD, "He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust."
Surely he volition salvage you from the fowler'southward snare and from the mortiferous pestilence.
He volition cover you with his feathers, and nether his wings you volition find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.
You will not fear the terror of dark, nor the arrow that flies by day,nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday.
A thousand may autumn at your side, x thousand at your right hand, merely it volition not come nigh y'all.
You lot will only observe with your eyes and come across the punishment of the wicked.
If you say, "The LORD is my refuge," and you brand the Most Loftier your home,no damage will overtake y'all, no disaster will come up near your tent.
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