“I have definitely had people trying to psychologically distance themselves from me and my case,” he said, “but I haven’t been surprised by these reactions — partly because, truth be told, I used to engage in them too.”

In a way, this bias is a modified, pandemic-ready version of the just-world fallacy, the bias that makes us believe that good things ultimately happen to good people and bad things ultimately happen to bad ones. We’d all like to believe there’s a reason for a person’s ill luck. That bad luck might be insolently random, working its way through the world with pitiless indifference to who or what we are, is simply too upsetting.

It is, of course, a natural instinct to fear our own mortality. In “The Denial of Death,” published in 1973, the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker went so far as to argue that our dread of dying is what motivates all of human behavior, that it’s responsible for the whole of culture, of civilization; how else to create meaning for ourselves?

But it’s irresponsible when this denial affects our political rhetoric, especially during a historic pandemic. “The risk to the average American is low” went the Trump administration mantra for weeks on end — meaning that older Americans weren’t average, and neither were smokers, or people with heart disease or diabetes or compromised immune systems.

Now we see that African-Americans and Latinos are disproportionately dying, because they’re more apt to work high-exposure jobs and less apt to have access to high-quality health care. Are they not average either?

And what of all the Americans who are dying of Covid-19 for reasons doctors can’t discern at all?

How you speak about a disease matters, as Susan Sontag pointed out so long ago in “Illness as Metaphor.” It informs the very way that you treat it. When the president described Covid-19 as “the Chinese virus,” he wasn’t just deflecting blame for his slow response; he was explaining it. He thought of the novel coronavirus as something that happened only to Americans who went to China, or those who were in contact with people who had been to China. This was our testing policy for weeks.

It was, once again, Donald J. Trump’s own form of psychological distancing, and it had lethal consequences. It’s little different from the mentality that led young people to go tra-la-la-ing on the beaches of Florida over spring break, oblivious to the notion that they might silently spread the disease to the busboys who cleared their food, the cashier who handed them their beer, or their parents who waited for them back home. (It was also foolish for them to believe they were completely immune: Statistics say otherwise.)

The only way to fight this pandemic is through identification with its victims, not deliberate estrangement from them. As we spend weeks — months — in isolation, it’s our connectedness we ought to keep in mind. This virus affects us all. Je suis Covid.

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