Human compassion needed

Outrage broke when presidential adviser Joey Concepcion reportedly said that poor Filipinos “are somehow resilient” against COVID-19.

He was quoted as saying, “Maybe because [the poor] are so used to so much exposure that they have a better immunity than us who are sheltered in well-protected environments.”

Apparently, his actual point was that isolating the sick, not the healthy, would be a better response to the coronavirus crisis in the Philippines. But netizens could not let his “poor” comment slide, criticizing it as matapobre, ill-informed, and callous. And ill-informed, callous statements are the last thing we need in these bleak days.

Alongside scientific awareness, compassion is vital during a time like this. It’s more than a cliché. Being considerate toward others is now a necessity, partly because fighting a pandemic requires us to work with each other (while physically distanced), and more importantly because empathy helps us stay human and maintain a livable society.

We do not want to become monsters who would sacrifice the well-being of others for our own comfort.The pandemic is revealing our capacity to be human—or lack thereof.

For one, there is an antipoor sentiment that’s growing more pronounced on social media. People are quick to outline the faults they see in the lower class, such as that they’re lazy, irresponsible, dependent on handouts, and prone to vice.

This introduces the argument that the poor are a burden on the government and a black hole for taxpayer money, that their economic situation is their own doing, and that they don’t deserve to be “spoonfed” with relief packages.

Whether or not you share these views shouldn’t matter right now. A deadly pandemic is not the best time to rebuff the so-called lazy lower class. The reality is that if we’re so caught up in cold pragmatism that we leave the poor to fend for themselves during a pandemic, many would literally starve and get sick.

A similar iron-heartedness shows in some arguments for herd immunity. In a nutshell, herd immunity is when enough people are immune to a disease that those who are not immune are practically protected from exposure. This is how a viral disease like COVID-19 could stop spreading.

The requisite for herd immunity is that a large fraction of people should be immune. With some diseases like measles and the flu, this can be achieved by vaccination. But there is no vaccine against COVID-19 yet. The only other path toward herd immunity is to let many people contract it and survive it—a path that’s obviously risky and terrifyingly indifferent. As Anna Holligan wrote in BBC News, “Allowing a deadly virus to spread through society to create a level of immunity implicitly means accepting people will die.”

The natural herd immunity concept is most controversially adopted in Sweden, where the death rate is now significantly higher than that of many other European countries. The United Kingdom and the Netherlands initially supported the idea of group immunity as well, but had to ease back due to researchers warning that it is not practical for many solid reasons.

Yet elsewhere, even here in the Philippines, you’d find some people embracing this concept, at times even freely admitting that other people’s health would have to be put on the line.

“A virus kills people, period,” I read someone comment online, attempting to rationalize the potential loss of lives that could result if natural group immunity is pursued. This is unfortunately true, but this is also exactly why empathy is needed. Humans—those of us who are not ruthless animals—would remember that the vulnerable and the sick are not mere statistics. They’re actual living people. We help and protect each other whenever we can, because that’s what humans do. We don’t just say “Too bad” when they die like sacrificial lambs.

Neuroscientist Peter Sterling wrote about “empathy distribution” during the pandemic. He said that empathy is a trait that is substantially coded in our genes, and that some individuals simply have low empathy. The article concludes that while “we proceed to our empathic sweet spots,” we’ll also have to accept that empathy as a trait is distributed.

So is it too much to ask for our public officials and policymakers and online friends to be compassionate? If empathy runs short, could we instead operate with the most basic respect for human life and health—not just our own, but everyone’s?

hyacinthjt@gmail.com