As the COVID-19 pandemic becomes increasingly severe, there have been several instances of people who tested positive for the disease hiding information from investigators during contact tracing. To ensure that all confirmed cases and their respective contacts tell the truth during contact tracing, people should stop encouraging witch hunts and ridiculing confirmed cases.
As the number of COVID-19 cases in Taiwan has been low, most people have looked at every case as exceptional. Under such circumstances, the public has focused on the movement of confirmed cases and speculated about their private lives as they tried to figure out how they had been infected. That approach does little to help the situation, and it could even punch a hole in the nation’s epidemic prevention armor.
Take, for example, a large cluster of COVID-19 infections that started at a local hostess teahouse in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華). After Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) said one confirmed case had been engaged in “person-to-person contact” with a hostess at such an establishment, the case was widely discussed by the general public.
Many people have read too much into what Chen said and even mocked the infected person. However, in practice, we constantly have interpersonal contacts with the people we work with every day: Are these contacts not also “human-to-human contacts”?
While many links might have been drawn between the “teahouse culture” in Wanhua and sexual services, society has overlooked that such teahouses can also be venues for finding companionship, where patrons can drink tea with their friends or sing karaoke.
Just like many small eateries, teahouses offer people at the bottom of society a certain emotional outlet and support. Even if sexual contact is involved, that should not be much of a concern to the general public.
Reviewing the private lives of COVID-19 patients does more harm than good. Particularly in the face of the public’s groundless projections and overinterpretations of official’s comments, it is quite easy to imagine how ill at ease this would make those involved in teahouses feel in a society such as Taiwan, where sex still carries a stigma.
If society at large becomes used to such a witch-hunt culture, people would think that it has nothing to do with them personally, so do nothing to try to curb it, and they might even join the hunt, laughing at those being targeted. If they themselves become the center of a disease source investigation someday, how many of them would be brave enough to tell the truth when the outside world puts them under a magnifying glass? This would only make disease prevention efforts even more difficult.
Now is the critical moment that would decide if the pandemic would slow over the next few weeks. As responsible citizens, all we can do is strictly comply with the government’s disease prevention measures, stop forwarding or sending messages from an unclear source, and stop initiating witch hunts by discussing the private lives of people who have tested positive.
If we all manage to do that, we should have a real chance of fixing the broken safety net, and rebuilding our homeland into a strong democratic fortress.
Lin Shu-heng is a journalist.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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