The New Yorker:
How does a virus take over a community? Slowly. Perniciously. Inconclusively. The first line of attack is not an aching body or a runny nose but an unease that seeps into every corner of life, and which is impossible to explain away because it is reasonable, even necessary. You must listen to this fear. You must calibrate your responses correctly. Otherwise, you are irresponsible, you are careless; in the body of the community, you are a failing organ.
Here in Singapore, we are perched awkwardly on the edge of the coronavirus crisis zone. As of this writing, ninety-two people on the island are known to have contracted the COVID-19 virus. First, it was travellers who’d been to the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, but gradually the disease seeped into the community and began to spread. So far, no one in Singapore has died of the disease.
But fear, it turns out, is also a virus. A low-level fright of this little-understood malady has taken hold in the international school where my children spend their days, and in the sprawling condominium complex where we live, along with a mix of Singaporean families and foreigners. This fear has the uncanny power to force out the uncomfortable questions that usually lurk unspoken in the communities it invades. You start out talking about the virus and end up picking apart parenting styles or foreign relations.
The virus has become a little-understood variable in a sort of living laboratory experiment in extreme urban and social management. Singapore is home to a diverse population of 5.7 million, of whom nearly two million, like our family, have come to live or work here temporarily. Virtually every aspect of life here, from public-transport routes to political discourse, is carefully controlled by the government.
The normal rhythms of the city are now punctuated by incessant virus-related announcements: emergency e-mails, stern notices on the bulletin board, and urgent WhatsApp messages from the government. Two more cases confirmed. School assemblies suspended. If you’ve been to mainland China in the past two weeks, stay home from school, church, and everything else. It’s worse than SARS. Don’t panic.
The frustrating truth is that we don’t know what we’re living through. Scientists are still scrambling to understand the fundamental facts about coronavirus, such as how it spreads and the length of its incubation period. In the absence of knowledge, we check constantly to see what everyone else is doing, having conversations that only lead to more uncertainty and judgment. In social circles that are preoccupied with family and schools, the coronavirus has become a microcosm of parenting itself: a crisis that compresses all the unease and distrust and self-doubt that lurk around the edges of child rearing into a slow-motion emergency that demands we all collaborate and follow orders.
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