Will fear of Coronavirus keep you at home on Valentine’s Day?

Valentine’s date or no date?

The most difficult night of the year to get a dinner reservation is on Valentine’s Day. It’s the most popular night for dining out. But I wonder how many couples in Canada and the US will be choosing to stay home this year from the fear of catching the novel coronavirus.

Some of us want to go out and have a cozy, candle-lit dinner, but we worry that while enjoying our romantic evening out, someone at the next table could start coughing and sneezing. We wonder how we’d deal with such an occurrence.

Fear of infection is spreading faster than the disease

Even though there is no current evidence that the virus is prevalent in North America, a lot of people are worried about catching it, and their behavior is starting to reflect this.

At a Toronto private school made up entirely of Chinese international students, teachers were staying home for fear of becoming infected, even though none of their students had been shown to have contracted the disease. This is a classic example of our tendency to imagine the worst-case scenario.

Panic over the virus is growing by the day. It’s now flu season and everywhere we go, we can’t help but run into people who exhibit the symptoms of a respiratory tract infection. Of course, this only increases our anxiety. We can’t tell whether the person with a bad cough has the common cold or something that’s potentially more deadly.

Putting the flu into perspective

One thing we need to do is to put things in perspective. According to the most recent statistics from the CDC, approximately 80,000 Americans died of influenza in 2017. Here in Canada, there are between 2000 and 8000 deaths from the flu and its complications each year.

Even so, nobody in North America walks around freaked out about catching the flu. That’s because we’re used to the typical flu that comes around each year. We know the signs and the symptoms and we’ve learned to live with it. It’s not a new, mysterious ailment that we don’t understand, and I think that it’s this fear of the unknown that’s making North Americans most anxious about the coronavirus these days.

Although at this point the virus seems to be well-contained within the borders of mainland China, with only 7 confirmed cases in Canada and only 12 in the entire US as of this writing, we’re still feeling stressed. That’s because it’s human nature to worry over unfamiliar micro-organisms. Germs are invisible and their mechanism of contagion can be confusing. When a new virus arises, we’re unsure whether or how it will affect us, and this makes these new viruses all the more terrifying.

Learning to live with scary new things

All of the hype around the novel coronavirus brings me back to a different type of threat. It was the time just after 9/11 and people were terrified, wondering when the next horrific attack was coming. I remember that the media was fueling the flames of our fears, going on about how terrorist attacks were going to become the new normal. I also remember making a conscious decision not to dwell on the fear of the next attack or stop living my life.

Since 9/11 most of us have gotten used to living with the threat of terrorism. We don’t like it, to be sure, and we’re doing all we can to address it, but we accept it as our new reality. There have been numerous terrorist attacks or aborted attacks in North America since 2001, from both domestic and external sources. Even so, our degree of fear around such attacks has diminished. We’ve learned to live with the threat. It’s become part of the new world order.

We did the same thing when SARS first appeared on the scene. First, we were terrified, and this terror was demonstrated by our behavior. But then when we learned more about the disease and we became used to it being part of our new reality, we also learned to live with it. We calmed right down.

I heard an infectious disease expert on TV the other day talking about how we’re going to have to learn to live with the novel coronavirus as well. Of course, first we’re going to have to learn much more about it. We’re going to have to understand how it’s transmitted, how serious an infection it is, and how to protect ourselves from it. Most likely, there will be a vaccine for the virus available shortly. Most likely, there will be some specific treatment available as well.

Right now, there might be a few empty tables at our favorite Toronto restaurants on Valentine’s Day, as people stay home out of fear of becoming ill, but I imagine that next year when Valentine’s Day rolls around, it’ll be just as impossible to get a reservation.

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