The Social Construction of Corona: II- Chinese Doctor Says Goodbye to Wife

Before a pandemic was officially announced, a flood of viral data anticipated it. A sentimental picture from china depicted a couple in face masks and tears in what seems like a farewell. The man is supposedly a doctor being sent to Wuhan and is saying goodbye to his wife.

The image, even if staged, captures a set of real emotions. It further resonated with the emotions of a large global audience, as evident in its viral spread and the captions and comments that accompanied it. This spread, captions, and comment, however, narrate a different story. Let me first explore the story the image captures, which I will explore assuming the picture is 100% genuine, before I move to the different story narrated by its viral spread.

The emotions captured in this image do not conform to cold statistics, but this does not make them any less real, or even any less scientific. From the start, we knew that, in terms of statistics and abstractions, the virus kills a small percentage (shifts from 0.5 to 5.5% depending on where and when we are). Emotions, of course, are not governed by statistics and numbers, but even the emotions of the doctor and his wife show a livelier engagement with what these figures mean: an understanding that a low percentage risk doesn’t make you safe, that if you find yourself in the unlucky 0.5-5.5% who will die, or the unlucky 20% who will have severe respiratory complications, you won’t find consolation in the bigger numbers. The fear and sadness in the picture may also be motivated by an awareness that the more you interact with patients the more likely you will become infected; a 5.5% probability of dying if you get infected is not the same thing as knowing you will most likely be infected and have a 5.5% change of dying. It is also important to remember that a small percentage doesn’t mean a small number: 0.5-5.5% on its own may be a small percentage, but 0.5-5.5% of a highly contagious and fast growing virus means large numbers.  

The fear and sadness may also be the fear and sadness of anyone going on a long journey and not knowing when they will come back. In addition, knowing that once the mission is over there will be a period of at least two weeks of quarantine and/or isolation may have been an integral part of the grief (I know my friend Wael Awwad is planning to write something on the fear of isolation, so I am not going to preempt his article).

The anxiety of the doctor and his wife, furthermore, may in fact have been more realistic than the state-of-science back then. The picture dates back to the end of January: a point in time when scientists were telling us that the virus only kills the elderly and/or those who already suffer underlying respiratory conditions; the doctor may have been almost 100% safe—after some screening to determine if he had underlying conditions— according to this scientific (mis)information. It was also at a time when the WHO, the CDCP, and other scientific authorities were lulling us into a false sense of security by telling us that the virus only spreads through heavy droplets that you catch by hand and that if you wash your hands regularly and refrain from touching your face you do not need to worry (before they went: oops, it seems the larger percentage of infections comes through inhaling the lighter droplets hanging in the air in the form of aerosols, sorry). Perhaps the Chinese knew what WHO and co. didn’t, and perhaps intuition was a step ahead of science, but the emotions in the picture seem to exceed the then-known facts. In fact the earliest appearance of this picture is so close in time to the now infamous tweet by WHO where they refer to a lack of evidence concerning human-to-human transmission of the virus—and in which they claim the Chinese government as the source for this preposterous piece of information: hard to believe as the Chinese government was busy instilling isolation and quarantine techniques that at points seemed to our global liberal taste quite totalitarian or dystopian (more on the post-Covid dystopia in another post, perhaps). Even if; WHO is not a news agency, why would it report facts on the alleged authority of the Chinese government and before its joint fact finding mission with the Chinese government which will take place a month later? But the WHO chief tells us we should stop politicizing the disease!

The viral spread of the image, however, did something different; it went overboard with a fear that already exceeded the state-of-science.

The image was circulated along with comments and captions describing the doctors’ mission in Wuhan as a “suicide mission” and commented on how the doctors sent their will not likely come back (again, not to belittle the threat of a 5.5%, but such a percentage literally means that the doctors will most likely come back—I was unable to find reliable numbers of Corona’s death toll among doctors in Wuhan, maybe because I am lazy, and maybe because the numbers are either downplayed by the Chinese government or exaggerated by Western Capitalist media).

This operated along the viral spread of the perception of the virus not only as constituting an imminent pandemic, but also a deadly one. Once again a small percentage of deaths of a wide spreading virus is a large number of deaths, and a tragedy is a tragedy regardless of the percentage it constitutes, but there was a Chernobyl element to our imagination of Wuhan and of the post-Covid 19 world, even a sense of “we are all going to die.” On the one side, and I am only half-heartedly saying this, we could read this as one of the ironies of the postmodern age: that public panic, though exaggerated, better anticipated the impending tragedy than science and scientific authorities did. On the other hand, and again, half-heartedly (the other half…), popular media, the popular imagination, and the viral cloud inhabiting the cybersphere, were spreading a pandemic that exceeded the upcoming one, spreading a case of panic that may in fact be making the plague worse, and which WHO was trying to thwart by not prematurely calling a pandemic (don’t worry, in an upcoming post I will take the side of WHO and its sober calculations against the pandemic-mongering Western media).

Scientists were calm, or confused between calmness and worry, the public imagination was panicking, and reality was somewhere in between (my constant criticism of scientism notwithstanding, I initially started writing this post with the purpose of criticizing the ways whereby the public imagination created a fear that exceeded the scientific facts, and thus by creating this panic created its own materiality, its own facts, its own pandemic before the pandemic; a closer look at the sources changed my course and showed me that imagination and panic were in some aspects– only some!— more real than the scientific facts spewed out by WHO and other scientific authorities).  

The horror was, and still is, imaginary: not only in the sense that we imagine it, but also in the sense that it spreads through images, including the viral image that is the subject of this post. It is also real; the imaginary element doesn’t preclude the real, and the social construction of the pandemic is imbricated with its material and biological contagion.

But before we pontificate on the real and the imaginary, and before our excitement moves us to cite or allude to Jacques Lacan (of course my usage of the terms does not conform to their occurrence in the Lacanian lexicon, but that’s trivial), I will make a detour and review a movie.