A virus is an infectious biological agent. Thoughts can be infectious, too. What do you call infectious thoughts about an infectious virus? Coronaphobia. Not only is the term already being used but some are already busy researching the topic.
Here is a sentence from the abstract of a scientific paper entitled Coronaphobia: Fear and the 2019-nCoV outbreak.
It is vitally important to understand the psychosocial fallout of 2019-nCoV, such as excessive fear …
Really? It is not hard to understand the reason for the excessive fear. Just turn on the TV, radio, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and you will find endless fear-mongering about increasing case numbers and death counts with no context. The creation of excessive fear should be no big surprise.
The more interesting question is not why people are scared, but, rather, which is more infectious: coronaphobia or coronavirus? Other articles have made it clear that there is no scientific basis to believe in a pandemic: the PCR test is scientifically meaningless; The New York Times admitted that the PCR tests are giving false positives; the CDC admitted that only 6% of the Covid deaths are Covid-only deaths (the remainder being people with an average of 2.6 other conditions). Yet, everyone is still scared of the coronavirus! Clearly, coronaphobia is more infectious than coronavirus!
It is recognized that people with weakened immune systems are more susceptible to invasion by pathogens. What would be the parallel to that, something that would subvert people’s commonsense and make them susceptible to nonsense?
If you google “movies about viruses” you’ll find a good clue. There have been dozens of movies about viruses and pandemics:
Contagion, I am Legend, The Host, 28 Days Later, 12 Monkeys, Outbreak, And The Band Played On, The Stand, The Andromeda Strain, The Seventh Seal, The Bay, Carriers, Cabin Fever, The Maze Runner, Pontypool, The Stuff, Resident Evil, Splinter, Black Sheep, Dawn of the Dead, Carriers, Blindness, Black Death, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Doomsday, Antisocial, Dreamcatcher, Panic in the Streets, The 5th Wave, etc.
A Politico article about the movie Contagion, relates that “the CDC administrator urges social distancing, avoiding shaking hands, staying home when you are sick, and washing your hands frequently as the best advice for controlling the spread of the MEV-1 virus.” The effect of this movie and others like it is to normalize ideas such as social distancing – something that is unnatural to humans.
Other media are involved too. A very popular detective show, Monk, portrays a brilliant detective who despite an obsessive-compulsive fear of germs always gets his man. In Dean Koontz’s novel, The Eyes of Darkness, he describes the virus, the Wuhan-400, as the perfect weapon. Of all the cities in the world, it was named after Wuhan where the coronavirus is said to have originated. We’ve been “exposed” to such “programming” for many years and it has weakened our natural immunity to nonsense. Add to this the current media fear porn and you get coronaphobia – the pandemic that is more about what is in your head than what is in your lungs!
In the movie Pontypool this concept, that words are how viruses are transmitted, is central to the plot line:
“Shock jock radio DJ Grant Mazzy and his production team are having an average day at work in their small Canadian town when reports start coming into the studio of crazed individuals going on a rampage, but what they don’t know is that town as been infected by a virus that is passed from person to person… through words.”
Coronaphobia is passed from person to person through the use of words … words in print, words on TV, words in social media and words in movies. It’s too bad that coronaphobia is so infectious or we would all be getting along just fine now instead of being scared of each other; instead of walking around masked and oxygen-deprived; instead of being scared to hug people; instead of following arrows pointing down the aisles of groceries stores …
Sources:
Coronaphobia: Fear and the 2019-nCoV outbreak.
What I Learned About Coronavirus From Binge-watching 10 Hours of Virus Movies
Coronavirus was planned – A Synopsis of devilish coincidences
Related Stories:
Why Can’t I Stop Watching Pandemic Movies?
5 Best (& 5 Worst) Movies About Viruses
20 Virus Outbreak Movies, From ‘The Seventh Seal’ to ‘Contagion’
12 Deadliest Viruses in Movies
How the movie ‘Contagion’ perfectly predicted the 2020 coronavirus crisis