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Fear spreads coronavirus stigma
“I was in a deep, dark place, and couldn’t see a way out of the despair,” says a Johannesburg mother who was shunned and bullied online by the community after she attended a Batmitzvah in March unaware that she was an asymptomatic carrier of coronavirus.
NICOLA MILTZ
Weeks before the country went into a nationwide lockdown, this woman, who has asked not to be named, was at the infamous 40th birthday party in Westport, Connecticut, in the United States where several people including South Africans unwittingly contracted the dreaded virus.
The mother of three, 43, a chartered accountant working in private equity, arrived back on Monday, 9 March, when there were already a number of documented cases of coronavirus in the country, and went to work the next day. That night, she attended the simcha. The following day, Gary Sweidan, the first member of our community to test positive, and who had also attended the 40th in the US, called to tell her his news. She immediately went for a test, self-isolated, and waited for the results to come out several days later. She was positive.
It wasn’t long before members of the community accused her of spreading the disease, and of being “reckless” and “selfish”. She was stigmatised, vilified, and lambasted by people she knew on WhatsApp groups that she was on.
During that “terrible ordeal”, she wrote some of her thoughts down, sharing them with the SA Jewish Report this week. “The stress of fighting off an absolutely vicious Jewish community who spread lies and hate about me and my family is taking its toll on me emotionally and physically. Never before have I felt so isolated and alone.
“I pray that my family and I make it through this absolutely hideous time, and I pray that none of you will ever have to go through this yourselves.” She was prescribed Xanor to help with anxiety.
She is severely immunocompromised. “While I was panicking about my own life, people were attacking me on social media, accusing me of purposefully trying to infect people.
“No one goes out looking to contract the world’s deadliest virus or to contaminate others with it,” she says. “There were many amazing people who reached out to us with love and support, but it’s hard to focus on the positive when you are being called a “p**s” in voice notes, and are receiving all these scathing messages that have gone viral.”
She can joke about it now, but it wasn’t funny at the time.
Her experience is arguably what people fear more than the virus itself – the stigma of this highly infectious and as yet incurable disease.
As the country’s number of cases rise daily, the number of people in the community admitting they have tested positive for COVID-19 has dwindled.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the reason for the stigma is that “it’s a disease that’s new and for which there are still many unknowns, and we are often afraid of the unknown”.
Some experts argue that the stigma spreads faster than the illness itself.
Emeritus professor in virology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Professor Barry Schoub, says the stigma is concerning.
“There’s been a noticeable and widespread reluctance to come forward to be tested by people who have symptoms or who have been in contact with an infected person. The reason may be twofold – either because of the perceived stigma that one may be identified as a ‘spreader of disease’ or concern about the possibility of a 14-day quarantine and potential loss of income from work absenteeism.”
Sweidan says he has no regrets about going public. It was the responsible thing to do, and he was lauded by medical experts for doing so. However, he still fields “odd comments”.
“Some people believe that I’m ‘Patient Zero’ – the person who brought the virus to South Africa. I still get the odd chirp here and there, mostly said in jest and in good spirits, but if said to the wrong person, might be hurtful. Thankfully, I’m thick skinned, so I just brush them off.”
Johannesburg GP Dr Daniel Israel says the illness has sparked irrational fear. “A person who runs a business, for example, who tests positive for the virus doesn’t want to divulge this information for fear that his customers won’t come back for months. They rather book themselves off for a cold or gastro. I’ve seen this a fair amount.”
He says if someone has been in quarantine for 14 days, they no longer pose a risk. “However, there is still this fear of contracting the virus from them.”
The important thing is to evaluate the real risks of exposure.
A person is at a high risk of contracting the virus if they have not worn a mask, and have had more than 15 minutes of exposure to an infected person, and have been less than one metre away from them, Israel says. If they did wear a mask and had 15 minutes of exposure, then they are considered low risk, and the recommendation is to self-isolate.
“However, some people consider themselves high risk if they were in the same building as someone who contracted the virus. This is driven by fear and stigma.”
Experts worldwide agree that when people hide the illness to avoid discrimination, they are less likely to get tested or treated. “This avoidance of testing has serious implications for outbreak control, hampers contact of infected individuals and their contacts, and compromises the collection of authentic data,” says Schoub.
“Sadly, there are no more Gary Sweidans. Our numbers are growing,” says Zev Krengel of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. “In our community, there are about 60 people in Cape Town and at least 30-40 in Johannesburg, with many self-isolating. A lot of people stay quiet. They don’t want people to know,” he says.