Mass hysteria and Moral panic in COVID-19
In 2020, COVID-19 took over the world becoming one of the largest, most contagious and most dangerous viruses we now know of, crippling the world because of this. But is it actually as dangerous as it’s described? This blog will go into how COVID-19 was distorted into a horrific disease causing mass hysteria and other psychological phenomena.
The media used fear-mongering to terrify the public, I remember at the start of the pandemic when people I knew who got the virus and I was terrified for their life. Everything I looked at, every website and person, was talking about the dangers of this virus. Luckily I can now look back on this and see the moral panic and hysteria the news caused.
Due to the panic caused, a phenomenon known as the nocebo effect was caused. The nocebo effect is similar to the placebo effect, where a person recovers from an illness because they expect to recover. Instead, when a person suffers from a nocebo effect, they get ill just because they expect to become ill. There are a few examples of this, but the most extreme is when someone attempted to commit suicide using placebo pills, not knowing they were placebo. He swallowed 29 capsules of a new antidepressant he was on and was rushed to the hospital. He was sluggish, shaking, sweating and had rapid breathing with extremely low blood pressure and a high pulse. Despite what doctors did, he wasn’t fully improving. He was cured when his doctor came in and told him they were placebo pills and within 15 minutes, his blood pressure and heart rate went back to the normal rate [1].
With this same effect, many people became ill and were rushed to the hospital because they fully believed they had COVID-19, despite only having a sore throat or a fever. While the effect has mostly disappeared, in our society it hasn’t fully left, and you have to be sure that the illness you have isn’t COVID-19 despite many other illnesses existing, as if every symptom you can have is linked to COVID-19.
Another scare was how the virus was publicised as an extremely dangerous virus, on a similar level as Ebola (the last major virus in the news) despite it not being as deadly. In the UK, the peak mortality rate was 1.282% in 2020 [2], but due to vaccinations and lockdowns to reduce the spread and severity of the virus, COVID-19 currently has a 0.8% mortality rate. Looking back at Ebola, the World Health Organisation says “The average EVD case fatality rate is around 50%. Case fatality rates have varied from 25% to 90% in past outbreaks”. But despite these clear differences, the news labelled COVID-19 as an equal in lethality and severity.
Lastly, due to China being villainized for supposedly creating this disease, hate was targeted towards China and its people. For example, violence broke out in Ukraine over a fear of the virus from quarantined evacuees from China. Ukraine authorities blamed the violence on a disinformation campaign targeting the country and spread over social media [3].
In conclusion, COVID-19 was deadly, contagious and a terrible virus to the world. But I believe the severity was magnified to keep people indoors as the virus would have been even worse if life continued as usual. Unfortunately, the virus was amplified so much that some people developed the nocebo effect and this developed into a phantom virus of COVID-19. Luckily the news is not focusing on the Coronavirus and the mass hysteria from before has faded away.
Sources
1 – https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/04/23/man-who-overdosed-placebo-12871
COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria, a fascinating journal on this topic and inspired this blog – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7913136/