When COVID-19 started becoming a pandemic earlier this year, the dread of the virus was not readily felt on the ground as it should. Rather, the negativity surrounding it was way more panicky in the air as more and more people were conditioned to accept its inevitability. Thanks, in large part, to social media.
Not that this virus isn’t lethal at all, but that it arrives on the scene initially as something distant. The contamination started its rounds in China late last year, yet it was only a couple of months past did people treat it as imminently dangerous. If not for the immediacy of publishing its claims online, the casualties might already be in the hordes long before it did.
But it’s a distressing situation also. As soon as you go online, the blitz of COVID-19 news on your feed somehow knows no end. It became a clockwork, to no fault of its own, that it’s almost impossible for anyone to miss out. Not a day passes without you checking in on it, including the fake ones.
While there’s a need to get informed or to stay updated with the news, doing so, however, intensifies the anxiety of it, as its numbers continue to add up to its already vulnerable situation.
So, the sensible thing to do is to cower in than risk yourself outside. The images online, the live feeds, some of which has evolved into memes, not to mention the constant trepidation of seeing the rising statistic of dead bodies almost every day, would come in as some sort of a baggage in an already heavy task of containing it.
No wonder some sectors are overly concerned about the effects of this unabating information of the virus on everyone’s mentality, exacerbated even with the duplicating capacity of these social media posts, that these COVID-19 tirades would haunt those who might have their own pre-existing (medical) conditions already.
But such choices are a few and far between during a pandemic. If the circulation of these COVID-19 updates would cause an unnecessary stress in us, then maybe we should accept it as it is. It might be counterproductive if we choose to deflect anything about this virus. The damage has already been done.
Besides, it’s almost impossible not to know what’s going on around. Everybody knows everybody’s posts online. And under the circumstance, any news about the sudden rise of COVID-19 casualties in other areas, not just in your neighborhood, could trigger a traumatic episode on your part.
Though it seemed sweeping to vent this fear of merely circulating through these social media outlets, because we might be guilty of oversimplifying it. But the platform has now become a ready receptacle from which this fear continues to run its course. Hence, what you don’t know through it will not only hurt you, it might eventually kill you as well.
image: Time
0 (mga) komento:
Post a Comment