The traps of calling the public health response to COVID-19 “an unexpected war against an invisible enemy”

Abstract

Any topic related to COVID-19 is too vast for a single editorial. This pandemic has revealed the bare-bones deficiencies of national health systems. The crisis has unearthed matters many might have thought the public health community had already resolved. The delayed local and regional emergency responses, the supply chain crash, the inequality in access to protective gear, the discordant and mixed messages of health officials and political leaders-in short, all aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic deserve serious attention and will be subjects for discussion and soul-searching for many years to come. Yet, one recurrent topic keeps puzzling me: the rhetoric for responding to pandemics is equated with an unexpected war against an invisible enemy. Below I take up each element of this rhetoric separately: the invisible enemy, and the unexpected war to dissect their worth. I argue that this entire concept brings to public health and public health policy more harm than help. I call for keeping the role of public health professional clear: to protect public health using proven scientific evidence and best practices and to serve to community at large. By instilling that a cause of infection is invisible, we are implicitly rejecting the science. By presenting a virus as an enemy we impede responsibility humans bear for driving patterns of disease. We refuse to accept that the virus-a cause of infection-is a part of the environment, which we, humans, are altering to suit our needs. By insisting that the pandemic was not expected, we deny the warning signs and the facts that limited preparedness efforts had transformed initial outbreaks into a massive pandemic. Most importantly, by focusing on the 'war on a virus,' we deemphasize the role of evolution-and our role in shaping the evolution-inspired tolerance to infection. The language we use to describe the response to pandemic does matter. In our efforts to rally and retaliate against the common cause, we are losing sight of the infrastructural collapse, the failure of early warning and detection, and reactionary

Ethical Issues in COVID-19 Communication to Mitigate the Pandemic: Dilemmas and Practical Implications

“…It can also distort the suffering and loss of those who were ill or died, by depicting them as soldiers in a battle whose death was an inevitable sacrifice in order to "win" a battle. It can also lead to a binary conception of the situation: creating a false hope that the "battle" can be swift and triumphant, implying that there is an immediate solution (Benziman, 2020;Naumova, 2020).…”