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Navigating Family

One of my very close relatives is hospitalized with Covid and I only learned about this by accident. No one in the immediate family knows about it. I told my parents and advised them not to pass it around because I was not supposed to know. The whole situation left me completely bewildered. Why such a wall of silence and secrecy. A cousin in Mumbai claimed she had all the symptoms and suffered for weeks but it was not Covid - just a flu.

When in doubt about how my relatives back home operate, I always check in with my childhood best friend P. He always has the answers. According to P, there is social stigma attached to this and if the conditions get dire then the person becomes untouchable. If they end up dead, the last rites could become a non-trivial issue. So for all those reasons, anyone how gets infected tries to keep it confidential. I had a very hard time believing P so I looked around to see if there was any corroboration to his claims. 

There have been multiple instances reported in various states of India where individuals have not reported their history of foreign travel or symptoms of COVID-19 due to the fear of facing social boycott and discrimination, leading to low testing and high mortality rates. According to public health experts, the social stigma associated with being diagnosed is creating a fear among the public and is acting as a deterrent to the effective management of the disease, particularly in the urban setup.

The stigmatization is taking a heavy toll on the mental health of the frontline workers as well as those who are recovering or have survived the disease. Media has reported the influence of isolation and discrimination on suicides in India.24 Experiencing isolation and stigma from social boycotting and religious discrimination can increase the risk of loneliness and self-harm.

The idea that a person could become a pariah because they got infected was hard to fathom but it felt both sad and scary. 

"I had mild symptoms and recovered at home. But our neighbours who are doctors and engineers and teachers asked us to shut our windows, not come out in the balcony. Neighbours tell us we are high-risk even after recovery. They have made us pariahs,"

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