The New Fear of One Another
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SYMPOSIUM: COVID-19
The New Fear of One Another Alphonso Lingis
Received: 23 June 2020 / Accepted: 17 August 2020 # Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Pty Ltd. 2020
Abstract The COVID-19 contagion makes us fear anyone and everyone. Fear those with whom we are quarantined. Fear those confined in institutions. Doctors and nurses, who nonetheless care for us, know the most intense fear. Keywords Fear . Nursing homes . African- and Hispanic Americans . False negatives . Caregivers
We now no longer look at others identified by their power, status, wealth, talents, skills, culture, or gender; we first see organisms like ourselves vulnerable to the deadly virus. We cannot fear for ourselves without fearing for them. What may strike people on the other side of the planet may strike me; what may save or heal them may save or heal me. To fear for oneself is also to fear for the others; to care for oneself is also to care for the others. The fear isolates, throws one back upon oneself. We fear the others. Infected people are contagious in the days before symptoms of COVID-19 appear and also if no symptoms appear. Some 40 per cent of people who test positive for the virus are asymptomatic (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2020). Children are to be feared; when infected they typically show no symptoms and they do not keep social distance. As of this
A. Lingis (*) Pennsylvania State University, Lutherville, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected]
writing the current tests are thought to give false negative results 30 to 50 per cent of the time (Zhang 2020). The agency of our death lurks in any of the others. We see the Grim Reaper in anyone and everyone. Though we show no symptoms we may be infected, may be shedding the virus. By putting food on the table we may be infecting our children, by taking the stairs or the elevator we may become a killer of strangers. We have long lived in fear of the impoverished and oppressed. Afraid to walk alone among them, we have feared the force of their humiliation and desperation. Now we fear their bodies. In the United States African- and Hispanic-American people are dying of COVID-19 at about twice the rate of white people (APM Research Lab Staff 2020). Many African- and Hispanic-Americans have no health insurance or inadequate health insurance and often inadequately treated medical conditions. Many live in crowded housing and are working at essential services and have to take public transportation. Forty-two million Americans receive food stamps in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, first established in 1939. In most states these people are not allowed to shop for groceries online; they must present themselves and their documents in person in grocery stores. People with incapacitating disabilities, destitute aged, children of destitute households, they are at high risk of infection by the virus and of shedding virus upon others. Our societies confine criminals, refugees, the insane, the gravely handicapped, those prostrate in old age. They are at risk of all being strick
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