An Introvert’s Thoughts On The Coronavirus (and other international scares)

(image via wikimedia)

As an introvert, my biggest complaint about the coronavirus is that the scare isn’t working.  I see people out in public wherever I go.  Colleagues whom I try to avoid still track me down for unnecessary conversations.  My family still wants to air travel to a destination I don’t want to go to for a vacation during Spring Break.

I was kind of hoping for a quick harmless panic, where people would stay away from each other for a while, but the coronavirus doesn’t seem to be scaring people, despite the BREAKING NEWS of each new potential victim.

You have to be careful with international scares like the coronavirus because you don’t know how seriously you should take them until it’s too late.  You don’t want to just make lame jokes about it, and then realize it is horrible and that you’re just made lame jokes about thousands of horrible deaths.

On the other hand, you don’t want to lock yourself inside the house and become a hermit until the scare is over, but… well, maybe you do… NOT because you’re scared but because you like it.

The great thing about an international scare from an introvert’s point of view is that nobody wants to talk because talking might lead to spreading of the disease, and we introverts get left alone.  Even if the health officials claim that the new virus isn’t contagious like that, this is no time to trust officials.

One reason a coronavirus panic isn’t spreading is that the name is too long.  Panic spreaders  prefer contagions that have shorter names like bird flu or swine flu or Ebola.  Five syllables is two too many for an international scare.  You can’t even use it when you’re losing an argument.

If you get mad and have to say something hurtful or vicious, it’s pointless to yell: “I hope you get Coronavirus and die!!”

The word coronavirus takes too long to say.  Plus, coronavirus doesn’t have the same urgency as something like cancer.  Ebola, swine flu, even Sars, all sound more menacing than coronavirus.  But nothing is more threatening than cancer.  If I’m going to be scared of something, it would be cancer. And when it comes to scary afflictions, almost nothing beats cancer.

Three different people over the last ten years have told me that they hoped I’d get cancer and die!  One of those people then got cancer.  And then he died.  I don’t know how I feel about that.  I would never wish cancer on somebody, even if that person had the audacity to disagree with me about politics and wish cancer on me.

I wouldn’t wish coronavirus either, but it’s more difficult to say.  If I wished coronavirus on somebody, I’d probably stutter and mess it up.

To be fair, this coronavirus has scared some people out of traveling. Book conferences are being cancelled (I mention that because I’m a book blogger).  Introvert authors are probably glad that the conferences are called off because now they don’t have to go out in public so they can just stay home and write.  But maybe the panic will still come.  Maybe it’s too early to make the call.

I’m not saying that introverts should be glad about a potential coronavirus panic.  As far as I know, we introverts didn’t cause the panic that makes people want to avoid each other.  I hope it’s not an introvert behind the scare.  It would be a passive-aggressive move to create an international scare just to avoid human contact, but passive-aggressive introverts are kind of dangerous.  Hopefully no introvert would be that diabolical.

If the panic already exists, however, we introverts would be fools not to take advantage of it.

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Here’s the romantic comedy you can read and listen to…