More Ignorance or Indignance in the Wake of Covid-19?

A recent New Yorker cartoon, as so often happens, nicely captured one strand of the million emotions spawned by our collective self-imposed house arrest. A man hunkers in his apartment, shouting through the window at another person across the street in their apartment: “I see you touching your face in there!”

Pretty much the same thing happened to me, when a neighbor yelled across the street when my admin visited my home with a mask. In the immortal words of Gomer Pyle, “Shame, shame, shame, Sgt. Carter.”

It’s funny, but you know you’ve at least thought the same sort of thing at some point, about someone doing something insufficiently observant of the new social-distancing etiquette we’re building (and breaking) on the fly. Do you want blood on your hands for waving a banner to unlock America? And ought there be reparations of some kind by those ignorant of basic biology and indignant about society’s need for them to help keep all of us safe?

· · ·It’s also one side of the coin of shame that already has built up around COVID-19. That side: “Shame on you for putting me in potential danger from this virus we don’t yet understand.”· · ·

The other side is a seeming shame that some feel about contracting COVID-19, or worse, giving it to someone in their circle who may even have died from it. Who would want to cause someone to die from COVID-19 as part of their legacy, especially if it was caused by their own indignant behavior about the disease, right?

I say seeming shame because we know far more people are dying since the pandemic took off than has been acknowledged.

For instance, a new study led by the Yale School of Public Health found that the United States had 37,100 “excess deaths” more than would be expected in more normal times in the period between March 1 and April 14. We know that COVID-19 was officially blamed for about two-thirds of those “excess” deaths.

But something killed about 13,500 other additional people, and in just six weeks. Some of those might be people with other health issues who had delayed seeking treatment, or couldn’t get appropriate care in a timely fashion from an overwhelmed medical system. Or maybe they died before they could get tested.

A neighbor yells across the street at an assistant wearing a mask. "Shame, shame, shame!" In the immortal words of Gomer Pyle. The New Yorker cartoon captures it: a man shouting through his apartment window at someone across the street — "I see you touching your face in there!"

The pandemic stripped the social contract to its studs. What remained was not pretty: a species that preaches solidarity and practices surveillance. The shame directed at mask-wearers by non-wearers. The shame directed at non-wearers by mask-wearers. The shame directed at everyone by everyone, because shame is the only emotion that requires no evidence and produces no solution.

The parallel to the AIDS crisis is structural, not metaphorical. In both cases, a public health emergency was metabolized through moral judgment rather than medical response. The virus became a character test. The infected became the guilty. The structural failures — of government, of healthcare infrastructure, of information systems — were obscured by the more satisfying narrative of individual blame.

The honest reckoning, years later: the indignation felt righteous at the time. It was not. It was fear wearing the costume of moral clarity. The neighbor yelling across the street was not defending public health. He was managing his own terror by converting it into judgment. We all did some version of this. The question is whether we learned anything from it.

Shame is the cheapest form of public health. And the least effective.