The COVID-19 Pandemic: A Test of Compassion

Some Christians view COVID-19 pandemic as a test of faith. I have different take. I see COVID-19 pandemic as a test of compassion. 

I majored in history the first time I attended university and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. Studying history in university sharpened my interest in the study of epidemics. According to family tradition an ancestor of my grandfather, my mother’s father, ferried food and other supplies into London by barge during the Great Plague and for that service was honored by the Lord Mayor of London with the key to the city. This tradition may have prompted my interest in the subject.

During recorded history and earlier the British Isles has been afflicted by a number of epidemics. The bubonic plague and smallpox were just two of them. According to contemporary descriptions of the disease it may have experience an outbreak of Ebola or some other viral hemorrhagic fever in the fifth or sixth century. With the beginning of the Industrial Age the White Death, tuberculosis, would become widespread in England.

The United States has also had its share of epidemics. Measles, diphtheria, and other diseases that the European explorers and settlers brought with them from the Old World decimated the Native American inhabitants of the New World. Whole populations were wiped out. There were outbreaks of cholera, typhus, and yellow fever in the United States until the early twentieth century. The last major yellow fever outbreak occurred in New Orleans in 1905.

Until the introduction of spraying with DDT after World War II, the only preventive measures that Americans could to take to prevent an outbreak was to drain any standing water where the mosquitoes which carried the disease bred or to cover it with oil to suffocate the mosquito larva, to install fine mesh screens on windows and doors and to sleep under mosquito nets hung over their beds. These measures involved people changing the way that they behaved.

What one learns from the study of epidemics is the significant role that human behavior plays in the spread of diseases. Indeed, human behavior plays a key role in the transmission of diseases like COVID-19. One of the reasons that Africa experiences outbreaks of Ebola is the practice of eating bush meat. Bush meat is meat from wild animals like monkeys that carry the Ebola virus. Another reason is the custom of relatives washing the corpse of an Ebola victim before burying it. In handling the corpse, the relatives contract the disease.

If we are to reduce the spread of COVID-19, we need to change our behavior. Wearing a face mask, maintaining a distance, limiting the size of our gatherings, holding our gatherings outdoors or in well-ventilated spaces, washing our hands, avoiding the kinds of activities that increase our respiration rate and our inhalation and exhalation of droplets and airborne particles containing the COVID-19 coronavirus, and having separate entrances and exits will reduce the spread of the virus—from ourselves to others, from our church to our community.

Putting these precautionary measures into practice and making a habit of them, not only in our church but also in our community is a way that we show compassion for others, the kind of compassion that Jesus commands us to show. “Be merciful just as your Father is merciful.” The face mask may be uncomfortable and inconvenient. We may draw hostile stares. But what we suffer will be little compared to what Jesus suffered for us.

When we view the pandemic as a test of faith, we focus on ourselves, on what God will do for us as a reward for our faith. When we see the pandemic as a test of compassion, we focus on others, on what God will do through us. God sometimes works through miracles. But more often he works through ordinary means. We may be the very means through whom God has chosen to work. We may be the instruments of his grace, of his loving care, to our community and beyond.