We are now one year into the COVID-19 pandemic. In the beginning, it was just news on newspapers and TV on the outbreak of a new infectious disease somewhere in a Chinese city, which many had not heard before. After a few weeks, each of us knew someone who had COVID-19 and had a unique COVID-19 story to tell. If these stories were to be published in, it would be very likely to hit the Guinness Records for the longest anthology of real-life stories ever published.
Storytelling is the common thread among all personal experiences of COVID-19. On newspapers and TV, the news reports are stories of people talking about their own experience and some experts commenting on the science of the experience. This sort of a narrative in public health has a typical rhythm and shape in which it occurs.
With a pandemic like COVID-19, it did not take too long for distant reports to become first-hand stories sharing how the-then emerging coronavirus is responsible for the hordes of coffins that carried the remains of those who contracted the virus, to start with. What is powerful here is that the technical 2D charts and numbers that we saw on papers and TV soon become life-threatening, if not lifeless, 3D reality. Imagine a group of social scientists observing this transformation of the social psyche as the society wades through the waxing, peaking, and (as of COVID-19, hitherto unknown) waning phases of a pandemic. How would they study the psyche that a pandemic conjures up in people? How would the narrative of a healthcare worker be similar or dissimilar to the one that of a politician who rolls up her sleeves to help her citizens? Would these narratives affect the common public health narrative of a pandemic? How would this big narrative affect policymaking and biopolitical interventions such as physical distancing and mask-wearing rules?
Indeed, that's a lot of questions but not exhaustive enough for social psychologists such as Mark Davis and Davina Lohm from Monash University, in Australia. For their latest book Pandemics, publics, and narrative, they asked similar questions albeit retrospectively to a variety of people from different walks of life regarding their psychological journey during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic (“swine flu”). The result is an intricate analysis of the responses they received in order to understand how storytelling and narratives helped shape the responders' understanding of how the pandemic unfolded, the nature of communication of risks and hopes, and the impact of it all on policymaking around the 2009 pandemic. For many who responded, the blame was either on media or the government for being hyper or lame, respectively, pertinent to acting on an emerging infectious disease.
Filled with anecdotes and stories from their interviews with the responders, the book tantalises the reader to be a page-turner, but in fact it is not. Some stories are meant for us to take occasional pauses and reflect on the narrative journey as did the characters in this book. Very much an academic treatise, the book is also not easy enough to assimilate and juxtapose the arguments with the ongoing pandemic or our knowledge of pandemics of the 20th century and 21st century so far.
If at the beginning of the new millenium high-income countries believed that pandemics of infectious diseases, such as the 1918 influenza pandemic, belonged to the remote past or poverty-stricken regions, epidemics such as SARS (2003), H1N1 influenza (2009), Ebola, (2014), Zika (2016), and now COVID-19 have shaken the illusion of living in a world free from diseases. SARS ended soon and H1N1 was not as bad as it was feared. While the 2014 outbreak of Ebola in west Africa constituted a serious threat to our existence and highlighted the need for a concerted effort to control epidemics, the emergence of Zika virus in Latin America and now COVID-19 have made clear that we are far from living in a world without infectious diseases.
Now our COVID-19 diaries are filled with individual and perceived social narratives of our individual and social life amid a pandemic—fear, uncertainty, despair, loss, frustration that does not settle unless our biases kick in and look for people or cultures to blame for the sorrow that circles around us. We find some hope in our altruistic experiences, heroism of frontline workers, magnanimity of those billionaires who (are supposed to) generously donate, politicians who lead our countries, and those whose words rather than actions spoke louder.
One cannot help but recall all this while reading Davis and Lohm's new book. Though I was compelled to think the book came too late after the H1N1 flu, as I approached the last chapters to assimilate the central message of the book, the reading put me in a Wordsworthian melancholia pondering about COVID-19. I exited that pensive mood perusing several community projects such as the COVID-19 Narratives from University of Pittsburgh, COVID-19 diaries from the Singaporean initiative Luck-It, and The Financial Times' Coronavirus Diaries, which all document the ongoing stories that we all have to share to the rest of the world of present or future. Only time will tell how social scientists would interpret our COVID musings for a better pandemic preparedness and management, since we are likely to encounter another unknown virus sooner or later.
