What we notice now are the sirens, punctuating the stillness with their grim wails, dozens each hour, hundreds each day. NYC’s 911 system is overwhelmed, and paramedics are making life-or-death decisions about who should be transported to the hospital, who is stable enough to remain at home, and whose condition is too critical to survive the trip. Each evening at 7 p.m., we open our windows and clap for two minutes to show our appreciation for those on myriad battlefronts, united as we are in solidarity and gratitude and fear.
Until as recently as a few weeks ago, Donald Trump and some members of his administration continually referred to SARS-CoV-2 as the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” emphasizing its origins elsewhere. Yesterday he floated the notion of imposing a federal quarantine on the New York City metropolitan area, and the governor of Rhode Island announced a plan to stop cars with New York license plates as they drove through the state. Both have since backed off on their proposals, which were of dubious legality. But the impulse behind each one highlights a common response when we are faced with an outbreak: the desire to blame others. We attempt to inoculate ourselves by foregrounding our distinctions from the carriers of disease. They are immoral, dirty, foreign. They behave in suspect ways, make questionable lifestyle choices, and eat unfamiliar foods. Above all, they are different.
I’ve written elsewhere about how the outbreak narrative taps into our desire to assign responsibility and blame, how we slot new information into old frameworks as a way to bring order to disorder, and how an effective program to minimize future outbreaks must tackle global inequalities in public health. New York City is, obviously, part of the United States. But to many Americans living in other parts of the country, we are a place of excess, of too many people from too many places living pressed up against one another in tiny apartments. A virus cannot be easily contained, especially one like this that is more contagious than the seasonal flu and has been circulating throughout the globe since at least December.
By locating the coronavirus elsewhere, its pathways of transmission become a way to separate and divide, rather than a means to reinforce the lesson that becomes more evident each day of this pandemic: as a global population we are linked now more than ever, by capital, by transport, and now, by disease.