Finding Connection and Resilience During the Coronavirus Pandemic (2024)

Across the globe, a coronavirus culture is emerging, spontaneously and creatively, to deal with public fear, restrictions on daily life, and the tedious isolation of quarantine. “This is a bad science-fiction movie that is real,” Agustín Fuentes, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, told me, in a late-night discussion this week, about how COVID-19 may alter the human journey. He envisions a profound evolutionary process to insure the survival of the species as pandemics become more common. It’s already visible.

“What is so important to humanity is connection. The kind of quarantines—in New York and Seattle, and what will happen in thousands of other places in the United States—will require people to connect in other ways,” he said. “One of the amazing things about the human species—once harmless critters not much more than monkeys running around—is that, over time, we have become very creative. We’ve adapted to survive. That’s what people will rely on now—coming up with incredibly imaginative ways to find connections even when they’re not in the same physical space together.”

In these early days of the global pandemic, human creativity has centered largely on simple forms of relief and release. In China, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak and a nation where almost eight hundred million people have experienced some form of lockdown, night clubs that were forced to shut their doors have turned to virtual “cloud clubbing.” Viewers can watch d.j. sets on streaming platforms and send in messages to be read live, to create the illusion that they are connected. The new reality show “Home Karaoke Station” features famous singers taking requests, engaging with viewers, and performing—from self-quarantine in their own homes. Shuttered gyms have offered workout classes online or via the popular WeChat social-messaging app. Other Chinese people on WeChat created a group looking for love under lockdown. In one of the twenty-plus mass-quarantine centers in Wuhan, the megacity where this coronavirus first emerged, women have turned to karaoke to lift the spirits of sequestered groups. At night, echoes of “Wuhan Jiayou”—or “Stay Strong Wuhan”—have been heard as Chinese shout encouragement at each other from their windows.

In Iran, another of the COVID-19 “red zones,” doctors and nurses—individually and in groups—have participated in a coronavirus dance challenge, posting videos of themselves dancing to lively music in hazmat suits. Other medical staff in quarantine serenaded each other or brought instruments to perform for sequestered patients. A third-grade teacher in Khuzestan Province improvised to keep her classes going online after schools were closed nationwide. Stuck at home, she used the side of her refrigerator as a whiteboard. With a blue marker, she wrote out the rules, with diagrams, to explain how to calculate the area of squares, rectangles, and triangles. A photo of her lesson went viral on Twitter.

Over time, the impact of the novel coronavirus may be so sweeping that it alters human rituals and behaviors that have evolved over millennia. “This could change everything from the way we conduct our economy to our greeting and grieving rituals,” Fuentes said. “We’ve had plenty of things thrown up at us before, although this is on an unprecedented scale.”

One of the keys to stemming the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, between 2013 and 2016, was changing long-standing traditions about dealing with the dead, including touching a corpse before burial. In just one case, in 2014, twenty-eight people became ill with Ebola from the three-day funeral of a prominent pharmacist in Sierra Leone; eight later died. “The Ebola virus causes a horrific death. You bleed all your fluids out,” Terrence Deacon, a professor of biological anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. “The worst thing you can do with Ebola is to touch the dead, because their bodies are filled with virus-filled fluids. People had to go in with guns to prevent families from interacting with their dead.” Behavior changed; the epidemic eased.

Traditions develop because they fit the ecology and biology of the times—and get passed on because the people who do them are better off. The evolution of rituals has already begun in small ways—not congregating, not travelling, or attending meetings virtually. Around the world, many people have stopped shaking hands, a tradition that originated as a sign of trust but is now the most common way of transmitting the disease.

“We’re such a social species that it’s hard not to touch each other,” Deacon said. “So much of our communication is about touch. We don’t have conventions about how to behave under circ*mstances like these. We’ll develop new cultural habits, new tricks, new mnemonics to get by. We’re already experimenting.” After the coronavirus outbreak, he attended a workshop of his peers at Stanford. “People were bowing or touching elbows. We didn’t know what to do,” he said. “But we knew we had to avoid shaking hands.”

I asked Deacon if he thought COVID-19 would mark the end of the handshake. “It could be,” he replied. “Behaviors are driven by the context. Shaking hands is about trust. If that behavior passes on a deadly virus, then it affects our trust markers.”

Last week, Sylvie Briand, the director of the Department of Pandemic and Epidemic diseases at the World Health Organization, tweeted a cartoon of “handshake alternatives,” captioned “the elbow,” the “Thai wai” bow with hands together in front, and a sort of queenly wave. “We need to adapt to this new disease,” Briand wrote. In China, the so-called Wuhan shake—a kind of foot-shake, tapping shoes together—emerged initially in jest but soon in seriousness. At the ceremonial opening of a bridge in Tehran last month, the mayor and the provincial governor traded fist-bump gestures, coming close but not touching their hands.

In Europe, adaptations to COVID-19 even crept into Fashion Week last month. Giorgio Armani cancelled his show at Milan Fashion Week, and instead débuted his winter collection from an empty theatre to an online audience. Even with no viewers, he opted to wear a face mask. At Paris Fashion Week, models for Marine Serre strode the catwalk in outfits with matching masks. Women in the front row of Dries Van Noten’s show were photographed wearing their own masks. In Croatia, the designer Zoran Aragović, of the BiteMyStyle brand, created mask accessories in bright colors inspired by comic books, Pop art, and Disney characters. They’re more fashion accessories than medical protection.

The need to adapt almost certainly will not end with a vaccine for COVID-19. “The Darwinian story here is that we are in environments where these viruses mutate. The common cold is a coronavirus that keeps mutating. Viruses are evolution in action—on steroids,” Deacon said. In the twenty-first century, changes in the pattern of human existence—from global commerce and travel to climate change—could produce viruses that breed faster and move farther.