Managing our fear of the Wuhan virus

During the recent Chinese New Year celebrations, the Wuhan virus was the hot topic around my family’s dinner table, with many relatives fretting about how virulent the new coronavirus is. I’m sure similar conversations took place across the island.

Judging by online activities, the virus is the talk of the town. “Wuhan virus” has been a top search term on Google and trending on Twitter for many days now.

Turn on the television or check out a news website and you will also see plenty of coverage on the Wuhan coronavirus, which the World Health Organisation (WHO) has dubbed 2019-nCoV.

The outbreak has caused global alarm, and understandably so. It is a new pathogen, and scientists know little about it.

Fear of the unknown is a very human trait that has helped keep our species alive through the millennia. It keeps us from blundering into potentially dangerous situations without first finding out more about what to expect and how to prepare ourselves.

But we should also avoid letting our emotions get the better of us.

Reflexivity — the act of critically examining our own thoughts and feelings — is important.

Before concluding that the ongoing viral epidemic is a catastrophe, take a step back and understand the reasons why many people are afraid.

Much of it has to do with the availability heuristic. Heuristics are mental shortcuts our minds use to make thinking faster and less effortful. Unfortunately, they are error-prone.

The availability heuristic is used when we make judgements about the likelihood of something. Quite often, the judgements we arrive at turn out to be inaccurate.

A classic example is this: We tend to be afraid of flying in airplanes but not riding in cars. But statistically speaking, we are more likely to die in a car accident than a plane crash.

Why does the availability heuristic make such mistakes? This is because it judges how likely something is based on how easy it is to think of examples of that thing happening.

We can think of many examples of fatal plane crashes because such incidents tend to be widely covered by the media.

But traffic accidents usually go unnoticed because they are an everyday occurrence and the media rarely covers them unless they involve multiple casualties or cause significant damage.

The influence of the availability heuristic was very apparent in another epidemic — the 2009 swine flu, caused by the Influenza A H1N1 virus.

I was only 12 then, and I remember how the grownups, their eyes glued to the day’s newspaper, spoke to one another in hushed tones about how bad the pandemic was and how many people were dying.

Eventually, I caught the bug. But it was nothing a three-day stay in an isolation ward and a brief course of Tamiflu couldn’t fix.

H1N1 is still around today, but has faded into obscurity. It is now just another flu virus — one of dozens responsible for the seasonal flu.

Of course, we now know that the 2009 variant of H1N1 was a relatively mild strain. It infected up to 200 million people but its mortality rate was a modest 0.02 per cent. The mortality rate in Singapore was even lower at 0.004 per cent, with 18 fatalities from some 415,000 cases.

It was a good illustration of how people’s imagined fears, fuelled by media coverage, can make a relatively small problem seem like a huge one thanks to the availability heuristic.

It’s hard not to overestimate your likelihood of dying from H1N1 if you’re constantly reading reports about how thousands have already succumbed.

To put the numbers in context, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers) viruses — which are cousins of 2019-nCoV — have a 10 per cent and 34 per cent mortality rate respectively.

The mortality rate of 2019-nCoV itself stands at below 3 per cent for now, though this could change if new information emerges about the virus or if it mutates into a more dangerous form.

Meanwhile, the humble seasonal flu sickens up to a billion people — equivalent to roughly 15 per cent of the world’s population — every year, killing up to 650,000.

Although this works out to a mortality rate of less than 1 per cent, the sheer number of cases means that even now, we are far more likely to come down with — and subsequently die from — the regular flu than the Wuhan virus.

So if you see someone coughing, keep your mind in check. Don’t immediately assume that they have the Wuhan virus. It’s probably just the regular flu.

And when you are thinking and discussing with others about the outbreak, do your best to seek out the facts and use logical reasoning.

Because the virus is new and little is known about it, people may fill the void of information with speculation and hearsay.

It has already happened here. Fake news that individuals had died from the virus in Singapore has circulated on at least two occasions, forcing the Government to debunk the misinformation and even issue a general correction direction through the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act Office.

It can be very tempting to share such rumours with family and friends, because they are dramatic and prey on our emotions.

But apply some media literacy techniques first, before deciding whether to press the “send” button.

Read about past epidemics and how viruses work on free information platforms like Wikipedia. Consume news from multiple outlets so you can corroborate the facts across different sources.

As Trade and Industry Minister Chan Chun Sing said on Jan 27 at a press conference about the Wuhan virus situation in Singapore: “This is not just a fight on the medical front, but a fight on the psychological front. We have to stay together, and do not panic.”

In short, let’s not scare ourselves unnecessarily, and refrain from scaring one another too.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jonathan Tiong is a fourth-year student at the National University of Singapore where he is majoring in Communications and New Media.