In the face of one of the biggest mass casualty events in American history, we are losing our empathy for the victims of COVID-19 — deaths often hidden from sight in hospitals and nursing homes, experts say.
According to psychologists who’ve studied genocides and mass disasters, something happens in the brain when fatalities reach such high numbers, The Washington Post reported.
The casualties become like a mountain of corpses that has grown so large it becomes difficult to focus on the individual bodies, the experts say.
“The more who die, sometimes the less we care,” psychologist Paul Slovic, who conducted experiments to understand people’s reaction to mass suffering and death after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, told the Post.
“Statistics are human beings with tears dried off,” Slovic told the Post. “And that’s dangerous because we need tears to motivate us.”
With the coronavirus — which has now killed 318,300 people in the United States — many of our strongest impulses are working against us, experts told the Post.
“Think about the disasters that have captured our national attention. … A hurricane like Katrina hits. News crews show the devastation, and people open their wallets,” Lori Peek, who directs the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, told the Post. “But this pandemic isn’t a camera-ready event like that.”
Over time, our brains gradually tune out the danger, the experts say — but some are trying to prevent that from happening during the pandemic.
Since March, the Twitter account FacesOfCOVID shares snippets every few hours about the lives behind the statistics. Alongside the details are photos of those lost to the virus.
The tweets are an attempt to publicly mourn the dead and show the pandemic death toll in human terms instead of in numbers, Alex Goldstein, who runs the account with a handful of volunteers, told the Post.
“I started it in March when the deaths started spiraling out of control. I could feel it becoming more abstract for me,” he said.
In the months since then, hundreds of families have contacted him, providing photos and asking for relatives to be added to his queue. With large funerals banned, the tweets have served as a virtual receiving line for the bereaved, the Post noted.
“You can see in real time after a tweet goes up as the family goes through and replies to every single comment,” Goldstein told the Post. “You can tell how much it means for them to have their loss acknowledged, even by complete strangers.”
Some sociologists believe the deepening apathy and lack of anger can be traced to who is dying, the Post reported.
The Post noted the disease continues to hit harder on African Americans and other people of color, that those over 65 account for roughly 80% of deaths, and that many of the biggest outbreaks have occurred in prisons.
“There’s no question that the demography of who is dying plays a role in the level of empathy we’re seeing,” Peek told the Post.
“There are so many things broken in our country right now … but empathy is something we know can be cultivated,” she added. “You have to imagine yourself in the role of others.”
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