“Fear” “Panic” sound like negative words, and like any other negative word people like to shy away from using these. Anything which brings about these feelings is shelved away from the conscious aware mind; fear may still dwell in there incognito; ignored, unaddressed, unheard!

A diagnosis of an illness like diabetes: a person with a new diagnosis of the disease has seen someone in the family afflicted by complications of diabetes. The resulting fear scares him/her. He/she wants to run away from the fear and what happens next is denial of the diagnosis.

I am bringing this discussion now because I see some parallels now with the fear of covid19. The media is loaded with terrible news, putting fear into the minds of people. Should we be afraid? or is this an “overreaction”? We should be rightly afraid, because fear is a necessary emotion. It prepares us to deal with the risks.

I am glad that people are understanding the risks and taking necessary precautions like hand hygiene. Why is the response so quick while dealing with covid19, while we fail to see people listening to any advice when dealing with air pollution and climate change? Perhaps because they can SEE people dying because of covid19. With slow epidemics, the effects are not visible in short term.

Others however trivialise the covid19 issue saying there are other deadly diseases around. The health awareness we gain from sars-Cov19 infection will perhaps spillover to other health issues. Maybe if we learn to become aware of risks and respond by taking necessary measurements for COVID19, we will also be able to deal with other risks which do not show effects so quickly but are equally deadly, like air pollution.

We should be afraid of pollution and its impact on us and others around us and keeping away economic losses take some drastic measures like work from home, virtual schooling, etc. We should listen carefully about the risks of smoking, sedentary lifestyle and take necessary measures to make ourselves healthier. Companies should take proactive measures to contribute to a healthy society and not look at success only in economic terms.

Dealing with covid19 gives us hope that we can deal with other pandemics in our country. If anything covid19 shows us how our actions can impact the world, a small event in a remote town in a country can affect global economy.

When we wash hands, when we avoid social contact, when we take responsibility to self isolate if needed, when we cancel our events, we are not just protecting ourselves, we are breaking the chain of infection, protecting someone down the line who may not be strong enough to fight the infection. Most of us will recover, but we still take all precautions for those who are vulnerable: our parents, someone else’s parents, our kids, someone else’s kids.

So, is it smart not to panic? I don’t think so!

Listen to your fears, know the risks and respond accordingly…

P.S.In my next post I will try to explain the risks of COVID19, drawing parallels with other risks to put things in perspective and talk about the now famous graph “flattening of the curve”.