Perhaps a better question to pose than “why am I so obsessed with the coronavirus?” is “why is the coronavirus so obsessed with me?” Everyone’s been talking about COVID-19 now, for good reason, but even over a month before the global outbreaks got “serious,” this virus had already become more present in my life than family, friends, or serotonin. Save for actually infecting me, the distant coronavirus has somehow become the most significant actor shaping the course of my recent days.
The first time I heard of the coronavirus was probably on Twitter, but, because once I read “How did Beyonce’s album go #1 in 100 countries if there are only 7” on that platform, the first time I really heard about the coronavirus was from a fellow University of Texas at Austin student, as he was messaging me why he hadn’t been to class the first week of school.
Him: Possible case from Texas A&M. Chinese student from Wuhan
Me: Dang, you still like Asians?
For context, he’s into Asian girls.
Him: No I’m done with them
Him: Worst race ever
For more context, I’m Asian, too.
I looked some up some articles. At that time (months ago,) the coronavirus was just ramping up in China. I read about how the virus had likely originated from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market and was most related to bat coronaviruses. My mom’s family lives in Taiwan, which is right by China, so I asked her if everything was okay over there. She told me fears were probably overblown.
A couple days later, she called.
Mom: Are you feeling sick?
Me: No.
Me:
Me: … You think you have the coronavirus, don’t you—
Mom: I think I might have the coronavirus.
She was serious. We’d returned to the States from South America the week before, and after missing our flight, had spent 12 hours in the Miami airport. I assured her I was fine, she probably had a cold, and hadn’t she said the coronavirus wasn’t that big a deal?
From then on, I found myself unwittingly subscribed to a daily text/call on the coronavirus. I felt like a distant aunt keeping remote tabs on the child someone else was raising. I was sent reports of the Chinese government misrepresenting the number of deaths, as well as journalists secretly filming workers burning corpses, then journalists disappearing. I told Roommate, who’s Chinese, and found that she was also on the Coronavirus Family Subscription, albeit a separate line. Over the weeks, we’d compare new developments and increasingly outlandish requests (made out of love, of course.)
Our families: Sanitize the doorknobs. Buy mouthwash.
Our families: Korea… not doing so well.
Our families: You can’t trust the WHO.
Our families: We need to buy masks to stay safe. But then people might think you’re infected.
Our families: Be careful. People are really mad at Asians.
Our families: Don’t talk to other Asians.
I tried mentioning the flu mortality rates as a comparison (at the time the estimates were more similar) to bring us back to reason. I also said I probably had higher odds of dying from a drug overdose, which might not have been a great example because it’s a genuine fear of mine despite the fact that I don’t even take Advil, and also because suggesting new ways to die are not helpful vs. hysteria.
There was still some humor in the situation, though.
Friend: If you can’t talk to other Asians, that means you can’t talk to Roommate. Or your mom. Or Friend 2, I mean, he’s half-black, half-Asian.
Me: Obviously, I can only talk to him half the time.
But things really came to a head regarding spring break plans. A couple friends and I had been planning to spend it in Europe, and while the coronavirus was at the time pretty much contained in East Asia, Mom was worried. As we neared the 24-hour deadline to refund the ticket, we started arguing.
Apparently, she’d spent the past few weeks self-quarantined at home and had been occupying her time solely with watching Taiwanese talk shows on the coronavirus spread. I spent a couple hours looking up travel restrictions and organization predictions, as well as asking my friends whether I was being unreasonable. We all figured the “threat” was miniscule and worlds away, but Mom was convinced that she had more information than any of us, and that at the end of February, Wuhan was going to open up and people were going to flood out and enter all the airports and—
Me: WHO’S GONNA LET THEM IN??
Mom: What happens if you get quarantined abroad for 14 days and can’t return to school?
Incensed by what I viewed as an extreme overreaction, I said that she was being irrational and paranoid, a comment that—like milk, babies named Cosby, and the Game of Thrones series—did not age well at all. She said things she later regretted, and the tickets were cancelled. We didn’t speak after that… for about a day, until my phone got stolen in NOLA and we started calling by virtue of necessity because she had my phone’s location.
Which is how family works, I guess.
Friend 3: All that… over the coronavirus?? It’s basically just in Asia.
Me: I mean, I get where she’s coming from, but I don’t agree with how she went about it. And I wanted to stew, you know?
Friend 3: Yeah, and now the leverage is gone.
Me: Kinda funny, in a way. Wouldn’t it be funnier if she were actually right, though?
Entire group: *laughs*
The two weeks since then have truly made for a losing game. One by one, events I’d been planning to volunteer at/attend began to get cancelled. I figured the Far East food festival, which I’d volunteered at last year, cancelled because some people would be concerned about consuming Asian food (I mean, they did it to Corona beer.) But Far East Fest was just the first.
Overnight, news broke that the coronavirus had spread to Italy. UT recalled students studying abroad (who knows what they’ll do, unenrolled in classes?) My friends cancelled their flights to London. The university cancelled ExploreUT, our visitor day. Capital Factory, a startup incubator/coworking space, cancelled its Startup Crawl event. Following a series of cancellations by big tech companies like Google, Netflix, Facebook and Yahoo pulled out of SXSW, the $350M revenue-generating festival was also cancelled. Despite there being no cases in Austin (yet,) the City of Austin recently declared “a state of disaster.” And my mother, through it all, reminds me to wash my hands.
Maybe the media is making things scarier than they seem. Maybe the coronavirus is as serious as it’s starting to appear. Regardless, in times of uncertainty, you cling to what you know. And what I know is, undeniably, that the true horror isn’t getting infected, but realizing that my mother was right all along.
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nicolesundays 
I fear that panic will kill more people than the virus.
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