Selected points from the audio-visual presentation
How Should We Face Our Fear of Coronavirus? (Dr Aydin Areta)
Prepared by: Hannah Saatchi

✅ We assess the risks associated with dangers in the world around us not rationally but emotionally. For example, our fear of flying is not based on the rational risk of air travel compared with travelling by car, but is intertwined with mental images of loss of control, falling and certain death. The situation people around the world face today, and media reports of coronavirus deaths, are rather like hearing every day that hundreds of aircraft have crashed while knowing that each day we ourselves might be required to board a plane.

✅ Our minds naturally focus more strongly on new and uncontrolled dangers than on familiar ones because uncontrolled risks place us in absolute chaos, whereas controlled risks allow us to stand at the boundary between order and chaos. At the same time, part of the mind always fears the unknown more than the known, so we focus more upon it and magnify its dangers. At present the entire world’s attention is focused on coronavirus because it has appeared suddenly from the unknown. With time and increased knowledge, this focus will diminish and we will learn how to live with the risks and dangers of this disease, just as human beings have done for millennia.

✅ Accepting dangers and suffering is always the first great step toward overcoming them. With coronavirus, a realistic possibility is that we must prepare ourselves to live alongside a virus that may remain among us for years like influenza, although over time, as vaccines and treatments arrive, the dangers of the disease will diminish and its risks become manageable.

✅ In the numerical analysis being discussed here, each of us has roughly a 97 per cent chance of overcoming the disease (around 99.5 per cent among younger people and close to 85 per cent among people over eighty). What can overwhelm us psychologically is concentrating upon the smaller possibility of our own death at an individual level, which can bring both individuals and society toward psychological disintegration.

✅ At the individual level, each of us should approach the risks of this disease realistically, with hope and determination, so that at the social level we can overcome what threatens our social life with order and focus, while supporting those who are more vulnerable.

✅ Moments such as these are a great test for all of us. Nothing places a society on the path toward long-term success more securely than standing beside truth and integrity. There is no such thing as a beneficial lie at such moments; failing to understand this leads to the breakdown of social solidarity and public trust.

✅ Spreading social anxiety through false, unverified and unscientific information, separating ourselves from others and from their fate, and attacking one another are neither wise nor far-sighted. These behaviours begin with us and, at a larger scale in the administration of society, reveal themselves as a comprehensive crisis of management.

✅ At the individual level, the first question each of us must answer is: what should I not be doing? What am I doing in these circumstances that I know in my heart is wrong and that does nothing to loosen the knots of the social crisis? I must stop doing it. If all of us do so, truth itself will show us a path out of the crisis.

Dr Aydin Areta