Around the world, people who accidentally spread the coronavirus must face both a dangerous illness and an onslaught of online condemnation.
On February 18th, Nga Nguyen, an Instagram influencer who likes travel and couture, flew from London—her “base”—to Milan, where she attended Gucci’s spring show. The fashion house picked up the bill for the flight and the hotel. Nga, who is twenty-eight, explained to me, “I have a very good relationship with all the brands, whether as a long-term client or just as a friend.” She was joined in Milan by her sister, Nhung, who is a year younger and lives in Hanoi, where she manages a luxury hotel that their family owns. A week after the Gucci event, the sisters took the Eurostar to Paris, for the Saint Laurent show; they then went to London, where they stayed at Nga’s house. On March 1st, Nhung flew back to Vietnam and Nga made a short business trip to Germany, where she also took a relative to a doctor’s appointment. In the examination room, Nga coughed slightly. “The doctor looked up and suggested a coronavirus test,” she recalled. “I thought he was joking.”
The doctor swabbed a mucus sample from Nga’s nose, and told her to go to the relative’s house and wait. She remembers feeling fine, but that evening she developed a fever, and her cough worsened. Two days later, she had pneumonia, and her coronavirus test was positive. A runner who can normally cover four miles in half an hour, she could barely walk. On March 12th, emergency workers took Nga to the hospital. She remained there for more than a week, then returned to her relative’s house, where she eventually made a full recovery. Now back in London, she feels “very grateful for the care” that she received in Germany.
When Nhung arrived in Hanoi, she passed through an airport checkpoint, and had no fever. But she began coughing that night. Four days later, she became Hanoi’s first confirmed Covid-19 patient. She spent two weeks in isolation at the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases, then went home to quarantine. She, too, has recovered and is thankful to the doctors who treated her.
The sisters’ experience differed in one crucial way. European Union nations have strong privacy protections, and no one besides Nga’s family and a few friends knew that she had Covid-19. Nhung’s case became public knowledge. Before she received her diagnosis, Vietnam had a small number of coronavirus cases outside the capital, and the outbreak had dwindled to nothing. A Vietnamese journalist told me, “The government was thinking of declaring Vietnam free of an epidemic.” Nhung spoiled the plan. The authorities, determined to make other Hanoi residents stay home, especially in Nhung’s neighborhood, made a show of locking down her street. That wasn’t all: the Vietnamese government, which regularly uses newspaper leaks to persuade or frighten its citizens, invited the press to watch a live stream of a meeting about the young woman’s medical condition. Within an hour of articles about the meeting being published, people on the Internet had figured out who Nhung was and found her social-media accounts.
In less than a day, Nhung’s Instagram account had ten thousand new followers—and many of them were attacking her. Things got so out of control that she changed her account setting to private. Although she was lying in a hospital bed, people kept claiming to see her bustling about the city. One user came across a photograph of a woman who looked like Nhung at the grand opening of a Uniqlo, and reposted the image on Instagram, announcing to her followers that Nhung was partying while sick. Another user posted a picture of a different look-alike walking along Ta Hien, Hanoi’s night-life strip, and suggested that Nhung was casually infecting passersby. Next came a rumor that Nhung had gone to visit her boyfriend in Vinhomes Times City, an upscale district.
The Vietnamese government, clearly committed to making an example of Nhung, let it be known that when she flew home from London she did not mention her visit to Italy. Not only had Nhung apparently infected her sister; according to officials, she was the probable source of infection of ten other people on the flight, all of whom tested positive shortly afterward, as well as the driver who picked her up from the airport, her housekeeper, and one of her aunts. Some of the infected airplane passengers were British tourists, leading the Daily Mail to proclaim that Nhung was a “super-spreader.” The Vietnamese government posted photographs of Nhung in her hospital room—ostensibly to prove that she was recovering—and social-media users marshalled these images to lambaste her yet again.
The wave of anger also reached Nga in Europe. She was pictured in articles about the fashion industry and the spread of Covid-19. It made no difference that she appeared not to have infected anyone. “The people I interacted with during Fashion Week were all fine,” she told me. “My photographer and my makeup artist were in close proximity, and they were O.K.” Nevertheless, enraged Vietnamese mined Nga’s Instagram account, including recent photographs from her trip to Milan and Paris, to portray her as heedless and decadent. Trolls dug up an old image of Nga on vacation in Mykonos, dressed in Saint Laurent and standing beside Salt Bae—the Turkish celebrity chef known for the extravagant way he sprinkles salt while cooking. Someone in Vietnam dotted the Mykonos image with bright crown shapes, to suggest that Nga was dispensing the coronavirus like salt. Instagram users gave the image almost eleven thousand likes. One Vietnamese commenter said of Nga, “She has the collective consciousness of a cunt.” Another declared, “Please help me send a fuck you to . . . Nhung’s whole family.”
The source of Nga’s prominence—her glossy Instagram account—became a cudgel to beat her and her sister with. One social-media user tried to pit the Nguyens against each other. “I’ve followed you for a long time because you’re talented,” a woman from the city of Ha Long wrote to Nga. “But I really cannot accept your sister.” She added, “I hope you and your family will recover quickly.”
The attacks hurt the sisters when they were at their most vulnerable. Nhung secluded herself and turned to meditation. Nga told me, “Battling the virus while all these articles are slapping at you makes it harder.” She saw the attacks as examples of class jealousy: “In Vietnam, we are too privileged—we travel too much.” She ascribed the extraordinary attention she and her sister received elsewhere to racism, noting, “If this was Paris Hilton, there would not be so much fuss.”
Public shaming used to take place in the public square. By the nineteenth century, it had moved to the newspaper, and in the twentieth century the forum was television. Today, people are scorned online. The Internet, with its opportunity for anonymity, its absence of gatekeepers, and its magnification of transient hurts, has made it unnervingly easy to generate instant mass outrage. The blog, a venue of self-reflection, has given way to the social-media post, which tends to favor the impulsive attack and the group pile-on.
Digital shaming delivers swift and overwhelming retribution, often unfairly. You don’t even have to be in the right to successfully pillory someone: all you need is to feel that you have been wronged. In 2015, an Australian man at a shopping center took a selfie in front of a poster of Darth Vader and sent it to his kids. A mother standing nearby, mistakenly thinking that the camera was pointed at her children, decided that the man was a predator. She photographed him and posted the image on Facebook, warning, “Take a look at this creep!” The post was shared twenty thousand times. When the man’s partner told him that people online were calling him a pedophile, he drove to the local police station to clear his name. It was too late: he had already been identified on the Internet. He received death threats. After his accuser’s error was revealed, so did she.
Earlier this year, when Singapore was in lockdown, a local woman was caught on video refusing to wear a mask while ordering at a food stall. The clip went viral, and online commenters misidentified her as Tuhina Singh, the chief executive of a tech company. An online mob doxed Singh—posting her e-mail address and telephone number. She was subjected to attacks until Singapore authorities revealed that the actual culprit was named Paramjeet Kaur. Social-media users then pounced on Kaur, calling her a “Covidiot.”
Digital shaming has its defenders. When wrongdoers are socially powerful, registering frustration with them on such forums as Twitter can seem more like collective resistance than like bullying. The #MeToo movement, for example, has exposed many celebrities, politicians, and executives who have engaged in inappropriate behavior. A similar logic has guided the filming of police violence that gave rise to Black Lives Matter. Jennifer Jacquet, a professor at New York University, has argued that digital shaming can succeed when other forms of political action fail: a viral video of environmental destruction can become a worldwide scandal that forces a corporation to adopt greener policies. In a 2015 book, “Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool,” Jacquet notes that the mere possibility of public censure is often sufficient to keep people in line: “At its most efficient, a sense of shame can regulate personal behavior and reduce the risk of more extreme types of punishment.” She recently told MSNBC that the Covid-19 pandemic is opening up “a lot of opportunity with shaming”—though she cautioned that people should condemn “a broad sweeping behavior,” such as gathering in large groups indoors, rather than harass “a particular individual.”
Online shaming may not be as brutal as the Puritan stocks, but it can be devastating in its scale: a target of ire who is trending on Twitter might receive hundreds of humiliating messages per second. Sometimes digital campaigns go too far even for those who unleash them. This past spring, a New Yorker named Christian Cooper went bird-watching in Central Park, and asked a woman to put her dog on a leash. When she refused, he began filming her, and she responded by calling the cops and telling them pointedly that “an African-American man” was “threatening” her. His sister posted the video on Twitter. “She needs a good public shaming,” one user said. “Do your thing Twitter.” Millions of people watched the clip, and the woman—a business executive named Amy Cooper—became so notorious that the investment firm where she worked fired her. Amy Cooper’s behavior was appalling, but Christian Cooper seemed a little shaken by the backlash against her, telling the Times, “I’m not excusing the racism, but I don’t know if her life needed to be torn apart.”
Lawrence Garbuz is a fifty-one-year-old trusts-and-estates lawyer. He lives in New Rochelle, in Westchester County, and works at a firm, in midtown Manhattan, that he co-founded with his wife, Adina Lewis. They have four children, including one at Yeshiva University and another at a high school in the Bronx.
One day in February, Garbuz developed a cough and a fever. At the time, nearly all Americans known to have Covid-19 had gone abroad or been in contact with others who had. Garbuz had hardly travelled recently, and he sat at his desk all day, so he wasn’t worried about being infected.
Yet he continued to feel worse, and, after his doctor suggested that he go to the hospital, a friend drove him to one in Bronxville. An X-ray appeared to show ordinary pneumonia, so no special measures were taken to isolate him when he was admitted. Garbuz is an active member of a synagogue in New Rochelle, and part of Jewish tradition is to visit the sick. As many as a dozen friends and family members went to see him. After four days, he was having such difficulty breathing that he was intubated and transferred to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital—again without special precautions. There, on March 2nd, he was given a Covid-19 diagnosis and placed in a medical coma, so that he could be on a ventilator without discomfort. Three weeks later, Garbuz was out of danger. By then, more than twenty-three thousand people in New York State had tested positive for the coronavirus.
Before Garbuz went to the Bronxville hospital, he had attended a funeral and a b’nai mitzvah—unknowingly exposing more than a hundred families. Unfortunately, he appears to have been an efficient spreader of the virus: his wife, his two children who lived at home, his friend who drove him to the hospital, and a nurse who treated him soon tested positive for the virus. In all, Garbuz was at the center of an outbreak of ninety infections.
His diagnosis was reported at a time when America was still hoping to avoid the devastation that had occurred in China and Italy. On March 3rd, New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, tweeted the name of Garbuz’s law firm—Lewis and Garbuz—and mentioned where his children attended school. The Mayor’s intention was to alert anyone who might have come into contact with the family, but the effect was to violate a patient’s privacy. A surprised commenter asked on Twitter, “Can you really spill this much info about a person if they test positive?”
Adina Lewis had long used social media to chronicle the turns of her personal life. After de Blasio’s tweet, she wrote on Facebook, “I ask all of us who are running on the hamster wheel of life, particularly us New Yorkers, to learn from this and take a moment to take care of yourself.” Most Facebook users who commented on her post wished her husband a quick recovery. A woman named Nora Madonick said, “That anyone would consider this anything other than a terribly unfortunate situation with no possible blame is unthinkable.” Others were lacerating. A young man whom the Garbuzes had never met posted, “I hope your business never rebounds for what your husband has brought upon us.” The hostility directed at the family spread beyond the digital realm. A New Rochelle laundry refused to wash the family’s clothes, and for more than a week their mail stopped being delivered; only after Lewis complained to the town’s mayor did it resume.
On Purim, Lewis returned to Facebook to wish others a happy holiday, and commented that she was trying to see the “blessing” in “this cluster of virus.” Perhaps her husband was “a messenger of something good,” and “his illness was able to make us all aware of the problem.” She reminded people that her husband hadn’t had any known risk factors. “Let’s all stay rational and calm,” she urged. “Let’s continue to find the humor in the absurdity of it all. I look forward to being able to laugh about the time we were all ‘coronaed’ (a verb I just made up) with all of you.”
The post elicited more than four hundred comments—many of them scathing. A resident of Rye wrote, “A blessing?,” and went on, “He did not go to one party he went to three. He continued to travel on metro north. He was coughing. His hands were filled with germs. Anyone he touched got sick. . . . It was thoughtless and reckless.” A man from Queens wrote, “He kept going to the synagogue where the rabbi and other congregants tested positive who then spread it to hundreds of people and now New York has over 20,000 cases and 157 people are dead in the city and people can’t pay their rent. Don’t call this a blessing.” Another commenter said, “I did have a family member pass due to Covid-19. I will not hail your husband as a hero!” Then there was the young man who had told Lewis that he hoped her husband’s career would not recover. “He deserves to die,” he wrote. “He’s a scumbag. Endangered hundreds of thousands of people. He will never be able to live in New York again after this and he deserves it.”
People with contagious diseases have often been targets of shaming. In 1907, Mary Mallon, a cook for wealthy families in New York, was confirmed as the first healthy carrier of typhoid bacteria. She had inadvertently infected seven of the eight families she worked for. Mallon was ordered into quarantine but did not accept responsibility: how could she infect others if she wasn’t sick? She was released from quarantine after agreeing not to work as a cook again. But she changed her name and began cooking for a new household, causing more infections. Forcibly returned to quarantine, she was denounced in newspapers and given a memorable nickname: Typhoid Mary. One article featured an illustration of a woman frying skulls in a skillet. In a letter that Mallon wrote in 1909, she lamented that she had become “a peep show for everybody.”
During the flu epidemic of 1918, the U.S. was at war, and many officials used the language of patriotism to encourage compliance with policies that staved off infection. In San Francisco, masks became mandatory, and that October a hundred residents of the city were arrested for violating the rule. (Most pleaded forgetfulness.) The Chronicle published a list naming many of the offenders, explaining, “The man or woman or child who will not wear a mask now is a dangerous slacker.”
Shaming has been part of each subsequent epidemic, from AIDS to SARS, but nothing prepared the world for the ubiquity of it during the Covid-19 crisis. At a time when ordinary social life has nearly been eliminated, social-media use is soaring, and ordinary acts can be dangerous, almost every day is punctuated with multiple waves of online outrage. People have been shamed for stockpiling toilet paper and paper towels, for going to stores to buy groceries, and for having them delivered. They have been shamed for not wearing a mask, or for wearing medical-grade masks on the street. They have been shamed for paying too much attention to their health, and for not being mindful enough. In the U.K., the police have deployed drone footage to embarrass dog walkers for using their pets as a pretext for engaging in nonessential activities. In Florida, a man dressed as the Grim Reaper, who has reminded people on beaches to keep their distance, has received death threats online.
Digital shaming seems to become particularly virulent when there is no agreement on what constitutes correct behavior. Many Covid-19 statutes are vague; the epidemiology behind the disease is in flux. How close is too close for sunbathing beachgoers? Are neck gaiters worthless at containing your droplets, or just as effective as traditional masks? Meanwhile, the U.S. is being led by a President who derives part of his political power from belittling expertise. To the consternation of liberals, he has resisted wearing a mask, and his disdain has been mirrored by many of his followers, who condemn mask-wearers as “sheeple.”
When two brothers from Tennessee amassed nearly eighteen thousand bottles of hand sanitizer to resell on the Internet, social-media users devoured them. “I hope that man from Tennessee overdoses on sanitizer for being such a useless, repulsive piece of shit,” a woman from New Jersey tweeted. Abashed, the brothers agreed to donate the goods instead. One of them issued a public apology, saying, “If by my actions anyone was directly impacted and unable to get sanitizer from one of their local stores because I purchased it all I am truly sorry.” He then told the Times, “That’s not who I am as a person. And all I’ve been told for the last 48 hours is how much of that person I am.” The Augusta Chronicle, declaring justice well served, said, “The vast court of public opinion is superbly suited to shame morally ambiguous opportunists.”
Even though the public has treated superspreaders as if they had intended to transmit the disease to others, incidents in which someone has deliberately spread Covid-19 to unsuspecting people have been virtually nonexistent. In March, ABC News reported that the F.B.I. had advised local law enforcement that far-right groups were planning to give the virus to their enemies, by sending infected supporters to Jewish services and spraying police officers with infected fluid. No such acts have occurred.
When the pandemic began, Wojciech Rokita, a gynecologist and obstetrician in Kielce, Poland, was also serving as a governmental health consultant for the region surrounding the city. Under his direction, the area’s neonatal mortality rate had gone from the worst in the nation to the best. In 2018, when he was fifty-two, his peers elected him the head of the Polish Society of Gynecologists and Obstetricians. Rokita, a prideful perfectionist, was known for upbraiding subordinates who made mistakes.
On March 8th, before Poland had any known cases of Covid-19, Rokita and his wife joined another couple on a skiing vacation in the Swiss Alps. At the ski resort, Rokita, who had helped establish guidelines for handling infected obstetric patients in the event of a coronavirus outbreak in Poland, frequently checked the news to monitor the infection’s spread in Europe. Concerned that an outbreak in Switzerland was becoming acute, he drove his party home earlier than expected, returning to Kielce on March 11th. While they were away, Poland had reported its first case of Covid-19. Three days after he got home, the country shut its borders.
Because Rokita’s job involved contact with patients, he got tested. The results took thirty hours to come back. In the meantime, he ran a few errands, including picking up his wife’s car from a BMW repair shop. Later that day, he was informed that he was positive. He began quarantining at the hospital where he worked, and spoke to the regional office of the state health agency, giving it names of people with whom he had been in contact.
Echo Dnia, a tabloid, soon learned that the first patient in the region to test positive was a local doctor. The paper posted the news online, and within thirty minutes Rokita had been named in the comments section. One of the employees at the BMW dealership claimed that Rokita had not kept a safe distance from workers. The tabloid didn’t mention that he had not received his test results at the time. Some nurses at Rokita’s hospital told the paper that he had also dropped by his workplace, violating sanitary measures. Outraged comments proliferated, including from people who knew him personally. “I’m certainly not going to let this go just because—thank God—I didn’t go to my appointment,” a hospital worker who was also a private patient of Rokita’s wrote, anonymously. “He could have consciously and deliberately infected me.” She added, “I wonder how many women weren’t as lucky as I was last week.” Video surveillance showed no sign of Rokita’s having been at the hospital before he started quarantining there. (The paper deleted the hospital worker’s comments—eventually.)
A commenter on the Echo Dnia Web site said of Rokita, “Someone should spit in his face.” Another wrote, “If he went skiing during the epidemic, and he’s really a doctor, then I think he’s a brainless moron.” Rokita’s cell phone was so overwhelmed by vitriolic calls that his family couldn’t get through to him. They began to worry that someone would burn down their house.
On March 14th, Rokita, voluntarily confined inside the hospital, called Echo Dnia and begged for the harassment to stop. The editor told Rokita that limiting comments about him on the paper’s Facebook page would only anger people more. According to his daughter Karolina, the editor tried to persuade Rokita to speak to one of the tabloid’s reporters, so that his reputation could be restored; her father said that he would consider it. Two days later, the press reported seven hundred and thirty-four new suspected infections in Poland. Everyone was worried, and some people sensed a conspiracy. The next day, someone wrote on Echo Dnia’s Facebook page, “Enough of this fucking collusion and sweeping things under the rug!”
Rokita tried to assure his family that the drama would soon blow over, but privately he was in agony. Karolina told me, “He was overwhelmed. Not only with the amount of hate comments, messages, phone calls he was receiving—even at 4 a.m.—but also with the fact that the attack came from people he knew and had helped in the past.” Rokita was touched when an old friend texted him with a simple message: “How are you feeling?” Rokita wrote back, “I’m still alive.”
That day, he FaceTimed Karolina from the hospital. She asked him if he was as sad as he looked. “I’m just tired,” he said. “Very tired.” That evening, his wife called his cell phone, but he didn’t pick up. The next day, Echo Dnia reported that Rokita had killed himself. The newspaper got this information before the family did. An online commenter soon revealed that Rokita had died by hanging.
Karolina thinks that her father’s act was intended to end the witch hunt against their family. She told me, “The same way we were scared for him, he was scared for us.”
Eventually, even the fiercest shaming campaign dies down. Public interest fades, and painful tweets disappear from everybody’s screens. Who still remembers such scandals as #PlaneBreakup or #CecilTheLion? Lawrence Garbuz was discharged from the hospital at the end of March. Since then, he has been at home, healing. When I called him, in July, he politely declined to talk about his experience. “I haven’t Googled my name,” he said. “Probably I don’t want to.” When I reached Nga Nguyen in London, she told me that she is willing to return to fashion shows when they resume, but added, “It’s not my priority.” She has been developing an environmentally responsible line of self-care products, and hopes “to launch by end of year.” She told me that her sister had been “more traumatized,” though Nhung’s infamy is also fading. The Vietnamese journalist I spoke with said of Nhung, “People don’t really care who she is anymore. There’s a kind of rule that, after twenty or thirty days, people should shift their attention.”
The Rokita family’s pain has continued. According to Karolina, no funeral home would take her father’s body. He was cremated, but hospital officials insisted that his family go to a location outside the city limits to take possession of his ashes, as if he had been a medieval leper. (A well-connected doctor persuaded the hospital to reconsider.) The Echo Dnia editor told me that he is sorry about Rokita’s death, though he noted that there is no official explanation for the suicide, and said, “The editorial staff made every effort to minimize the impact of hate appearing in the comment sections.” Yet, even after Rokita died, online posters continued to excoriate him. Some called his suicide a foolish overreaction. Three weeks after Rokita’s death, the respected Warsaw broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza published a sympathetic account of the family’s ordeal, but even that story was greeted with nasty online responses. One poster felt that Rokita shouldn’t have been bothered by all the online denunciations about him. “What interested him in the comments idiots were leaving?” another poster asked. “What a disaster!” This person speculated that Rokita must have had another reason for killing himself: “Maybe he took bribes and was afraid it would get out.”
Nobody in Switzerland is known to have caught the virus from Rokita. His wife and the couple who travelled with them remained healthy. Officials in Kielce cannot trace a coronavirus infection to him. His wife initially had a positive test, but she didn’t get sick, and a retest indicated that she was negative. Accordingly, Rokita’s own test sample is being reëvaluated. The results have been delayed for months and Karolina suspects a coverup, to hide official incompetence. She points out that her father’s Covid-19 test was the first performed in the region. Whereas Nhung and Garbuz almost certainly spread the disease, if unwittingly, Rokita evidently didn’t spread it to anyone. It’s possible that he never had Covid-19 at all.
On February 28th, Rijo Moncy, a twenty-six-year-old radiologist at a hospital in Italy, flew from Venice to Kochi, India, with his parents. (They were all born in India but have lived in Italy since Rijo was a child.) In Kochi, the Moncys, instead of self-quarantining, immediately went out to visit friends and relatives. Soon afterward, an uncle fell ill, followed by Rijo Moncy and nine other family members. Moncy’s ninety-three-year-old grandfather, with whom he shared a special bond, was among the infected.
After the family sought medical attention, their names were leaked to the Indian press. Trolls began attacking them online—with some calling for public floggings. The family were barraged with messages accusing them of deliberately bringing the virus from Italy. “The worst part wasn’t the virus,” Moncy told me. “It was the attacks on social networks.” K. K. Shailaja, the provincial health minister in Kerala, denounced the family as “irresponsible.” The Moncys took refuge in the Bible.
Moncy and his parents eventually went to a medical center in Pathanamthitta, and that’s when things turned around. The hospital gave them good care, and they were not stigmatized. Moncy told the Telegraph India, “They gave us a cake, food packets . . . and some rations which we never expected from a government hospital.” A nurse who treated others in the family caught the virus, but she didn’t get angry about it. “This is our job,” she said. Online, the trolls quieted down after Moncy apologized, in various media, for the family’s mistakes. “We thanked everyone,” he notes. “Even the people who had trolled us.”
Within a month, all the family members had emerged from the hospital, including Moncy’s grandfather—who, as the oldest person in India to recover from Covid-19, became a national hero. “He gave people courage,” Moncy explained to me. In an interview with a national magazine, he said of his grandfather, “Thank God he lives in Kerala. Had he been in Italy or the United States, he would have been left to die.”
Moncy has returned to Italy and gone back to work. He remains amazed that his shaming experience ended positively. Indians learned from his family’s misadventure and grew more tolerant. “There was so much ignorance before,” he told me. Shailaja, the health minister who had castigated them, contacted him after they were discharged. “She is a wonderful person, very smart,” Moncy said. “She called us at home, to see how we were.” The social-media attacks have ended. During the furor, Moncy told me, he had downloaded some of them onto his phone. “I have now erased them,” he added. “So I can try to forget.”
By D. T. Max @ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/28/the-public-shaming-pandemic