A Dutch photographer’s photo, showing his COVID-conscious family engaged in a group hug, has become an emblem for pandemic-related psychological trauma.
The photo: Dutch photographer Caspar Claasen posted the image, which was taken in July 2020, to his Instagram account in March.
- It shows Claasen and his family members embracing while some of them are wrapped in transparent plastic sheets.
- “In coronatimes, we surprised our (grand)mom, in her late seventies and living alone, with a few hugs in plastic sheets…,” Claasen wrote in a caption to the image, which was also posted to his website’s blog.
The reaction: Claasen’s photo resurfaced this week on Twitter, where social media commenters mocked the scene as demonstrative of overblown coronavirus hysteria.
- Geneve Campbell, a former project coordinator at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, tweeted out the photo with the caption: “I don’t think we’ve even begun to come to terms with what we’ve done to some people, psychologically.”
- “Attempts to calmly communicate relative risk and transmission dynamics stood no chance against our fear-for-clicks panic economy,” Campbell said in a follow-up tweet. “Add in an election year political apparatus cynically stirring hysteria, plus our natural difficulties contextualizing stuff like this… hoo, boy.”
- “We aren’t going to cure this problem with compassion, though. Peer pressure, humor, and ridicule can do wonders to waking people up to the idiocy of a few that’s harming a society. Tough love,” tweeted one commenter.
The politicized pandemic: Democrats and Republicans have split along partisan lines regarding how the country should respond to the coronavirus outbreak.
- Conservatives have accused the media and leading medical experts – such as prominent physician-scientist Dr. Anthony Fauci – of exploiting the pandemic for clicks and attention, stoking the public’s fears and issuing contradictory and erroneous medical guidance.
- Liberals, on the other hand, have claimed their political opponents are disregarding consensus medical opinion on how to address the pandemic and failing to “follow the science.“
