Summary of the article
In anxiety disorders, fear dominates the ratio. Unfortunately, a number of completely new ones have been added in the past 2.5 years.
Read full article: Corona phobias
Reading time: 4 minutes
Anxiety Disorder
A good friend of mine doesn’t dare ride an elevator. I live on 9th floor and when he comes to visit, he always takes the stairs. I also know a number of people who absolutely do not dare to fly and someone with a fear of contamination. These are called phobias, anxiety disorders. The first two are forms of claustrophobia.
I’ve talked to both that friend who doesn’t dare ride an elevator and someone who doesn’t dare to fly, and I notice that they rationally recognize that that fear is unfounded. Virtually no planes crash and it is rare that an elevator hangs still for a long time, let alone crashes down. Yet that does not ensure that that person then gets into the elevator or the plane.
It is, as the saying goes, “between the ears”. And it is apparently caused by a fear that is much stronger than the ratio. (Just as there are many more fears, for example, of spiders.)
Now I find it very annoying for my boyfriend that he does not dare to go in an elevator, but I personally do not suffer from that. At least, he probably comes a little less than if I lived in a ground floor apartment. But suppose he were the health minister and he announced that no one should be allowed to take the elevator anymore because elevators are dangerous, I don’t think anyone will take him seriously and he will soon be minister-finished.
New Anxiety Disorders
In the last 2.5 years I have come across many new forms of anxiety disorders.
It started with the image we got from the first Corona fireplaces. In the Netherlands I think the images from Bergamo came in the hardest. The images from the hospitals, but also the trucks with coffins, because there was not enough space in Bergamo to bury people. That was also the phase in which figures such as “3% will die from it” were circulated. The whole of the Netherlands reacted as if we were getting our own variant of an Ebola outbreak. You could see fear in many people’s eyes when they went outside, and shopping carts were only touched after they had been thoroughly cleaned.
Only if you adhered to the regulations of the government (1.5 meters, wash hands, cough in the elbow and stay at home with complaints) would you be safe, people were imprinted in all kinds of ways.
With every wave that came up to the beginning of this year, people were again frightened. If they didn’t follow those regulations (plus ventilation, which was added in the middle of last year and, of course, repeated vaccinations), they were at significant risk. Either to get seriously ill yourself, or worse, make loved ones sick.
We have never seen major opposing forces in the media that strongly put these dangers into perspective. Nor that it was properly explained how the infection went or how much smaller your risks were if you had already had the virus, or followed a certain lifestyle or took certain nutritional supplements.
And that is partly why we still see various variants of Corona phobias. Disorders based on fears that have no rational basis, but can have a major impact on that person’s life.
I will now go through a couple of them with examples, and will come up with more later.
Even one breath with the Coronavirus in it can make me sick
What strikes me when I follow the statements on twitter in the US, in particular, is how a number of prominent people, who indicated early on that the virus is spreading through the air, are terribly afraid of being in indoor spaces without the best mouth-nose mask they have. can get. A good example is Prof. Kimberley Prather. This physicist was also very outspoken in the spring of 2020 about the virus that spreads through the air. And she also co-wrote that letter to the WHO in the summer of 2020.
But this tweet from last week shows how anxious she is about the virus. Not only does she always wear the Powercom K95 mouth nose mask in indoor areas where she is with others, but in this tweet she also describes what she did when she had to take off that mouth nose mask at security for identification:
So she indicates that she then holds her breath for fear that she would otherwise inhale virus particles!
She has more than 80,000 followers with whom she shares this fear phobia. The more than 100 comments under this tweet show people doing the same, or even giving “better” advice.
This chemical engineer with 11,000 followers advises not only to hold your breath, but also to exhale slowly through your nose, so that no stray virus particles still enter your nose.
If you really think like these two scientists that if you inhale once or twice in an indoor space without a mask, you can get sick, that’s an anxiety disorder. Because that danger is nil. Because it’s about the viral doses that shouldn’t be too high, while smaller doses can actually be good. I have written many articles on this site about it. But most doctors don’t mention this and even insist that regularly disinfecting your hands helps prevent you from getting Covid-19.
Many people together, then many will become infected
I read a disconcerting tweet after there was a major event for the care workers in the Ziggodome. The director of the OLVG had posted this tweet about it.
If you read the comments under this tweet, most thought this was a completely irresponsible meeting for healthcare staff. It would be a super spread event and the virus would be brought back into hospitals.
It’s as if the healthcare staff, if they hadn’t gone to this event, would all have stayed at home and not have met other people in other places. And if you look at the overview of the professions of those who tested positive at the GGD in the week after this event (for what it’s worth), we see the same trend among healthcare workers as among the other professional groups.
But there is no room for ratio if you have an anxiety disorder.
I still remember well how a good acquaintance of mine, with a father over 80, wanted to chase everyone who was in groups of 3 or more in the Vondelpark in the spring of 2020. (A bit like Minister Grapperhaus also did). Because she really felt that those people were committing some sort of murder attempt on her father through their behavior.
Fortunately, due to the normalization of society, I see part of the Corona phobias disappearing in more and more people. But I’m afraid that if the numbers go up again and everything is done to get people vaccinated more, this will automatically activate the dormant phobias.