Psychic Numbing and the Coronavirus

Photograph of medical technician Airman 1st Class Rachel Tucker by Senior Airman Alexander Cook, U.S. Air Force.

By Andrew Quist

In a recent article in The Week, writer Jeva Lange points out that number of projected deaths in the United States from the novel coronavirus—100,000 to 200,000—is beyond our ability to fully comprehend. Due to psychic numbing, people feel compassion for one suffering person, but we cannot emotionally connect to the idea of 100,000 deaths. When the scale of tragedy rises that high, we become numb, and the individual lives lost transform into mere statistics.

Lange writes:

Numbers like 100,000 are difficult to care about; we can understand abstractly that it's horrifying, but it's also sterile and detached. A number doesn't tell you about the excruciating pain of “effectively drowning” as the virus takes over your body, or about husbands who never get to say goodbye to their wives, or about decisions made by anguished doctors over who gets to live, and who's going to die.

The scale of the casualties from the coronavirus inhibits our compassion due to a related psychological phenomenon called compassion fade: as the number of victims of a catastrophe increases, our overall compassion for the victims declines. There is evidence that compassion begins to fade as soon as the number of victims grows larger than a single person.

If we are to respond to the coronavirus in a way that values the humanity of each victim, we must all keep in mind that behind every statistical death is a person with a name and face who left loved ones behind. With this is mind, let’s act in a way that protects those in our society who are vulnerable to the virus.

Jeva Lange’s article, “Compassion fatigue is about to set in. Don't succumb,” can be found here: https://theweek.com/articles/906134/compassion-fatigue-about-set-dont-succumb