Pie-Pacifique Kabalira-Uwase, a 39-year-old business-development consultant, survived the Rwandan genocide in 1994. He hid under a bed to avoid stray bullets and paid smugglers to get fresh vegetables. Now under COVID-19 lockdown in Pretoria, South Africa’s capital, he told me he sometimes feels “triggered.” But not because the experience of quarantine actually reminds him of war. He gets triggered when people use the word “war” to describe the pandemic.
It feels so “incorrect,” he told me. “Comparing this to war ― you can only do it if you have not lived through war. War has a specific sound and a smell. The smell of war is gunpowder and blood.”
These comparisons are everywhere now; they’re fast becoming the dominant way we understand the coronavirus. On March 16, President Emmanuel Macron of France described the struggle against COVID-19 as a “war” four times in a single speech. A day later, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson anointed himself the head of a “wartime government.” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo uses the analogy liberally, sometimes to spur U.S. President Donald Trump to action (“Act like it’s a war!”); last Sunday, standing beside Trump, the U.S. surgeon general declared COVID-19 “our Pearl Harbor.”
