“We’re living in desperate times, and people are scared. With over 2,000 confirmed cases of ARAMIS in New York at the time the photo was released, I’m not sure what practical purpose it served to launch a manhunt for this young woman. The virus had already found a foothold in the city. It seems like a classic case of the authorities overreacting to make up for being caught off guard.”
Elsewhere, sympathy for ARAMIS Girl is thin on the ground. Many blame her for the spread of the virus to New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. There is a popular belief that ARAMIS Girl is a kind of modern-day Typhoid Mary, well aware of her disease and recklessly infecting others. According to Dr. Delille, this is highly improbable. “Given everything we know about ARAMIS so far, this woman has most likely been hospitalized or has already succumbed to the virus. I want to emphasize that there have been no observed cases of healthy carriers, only incubatory carriers, and the median incubation period of the virus is five days, with a range of two to 14 days. If this woman is still alive and asymptomatic seven weeks after exposure, she remains of interest to us from an epidemiological standpoint only.”
But false information continues to proliferate online, where an informal poll on CNN.com revealed that 66 per cent of respondents incorrectly believed ARAMIS Girl to be the original index patient in North America. Experts from the WHO have identified the first carrier of the disease from rural China to the United States as Zhihuan Tsiang, a visiting martial arts expert from Yunnan province who spent eight days in New York City before he died in Beijing on August 2.
This widespread misapprehension may trace its origin to a darker theory about ARAMIS Girl. Users on popular conspiracy sites have seized on the fact that ARAMIS Girl’s initials (A.G.) are the same as the abbreviation for antigen (Ag), short for antibody generator: a toxin or other foreign substance that binds to an immune receptor and induces a defensive response in the body. Based on this coincidence, online theorists have speculated that ARAMIS Girl might be a biological warfare agent activated by the American or Chinese governments. Fake news stories promoting this connection have proliferated on social media, which many believe has contributed to an alarming spike in the negative public perception of ARAMIS Girl and the Asian-American population as a whole. At least three dozen incidents of anti-Asian hate crimes have been documented in 14 states across the country since the photo went viral, ranging from verbal assaults and acts of vandalism to serious physical attacks.
Dr. Delille continues to defend the decision to release the photo. “We were trying to reconstruct the spread of the virus, both from a containment point of view but also for information-gathering purposes.” She points out that, thanks to the rapid efforts of the Department of Health, all of the other restaurant patrons and employees were located and either treated or quarantined within weeks of the first infection cluster on July 31. “There was no reason to believe that taking this simple action at a small news conference was going to result in such misinformation or violence. The 24-hour news cycle should take responsibility for feeding the idle curiosity of internet troublemakers.”
Whether ARAMIS Girl will ever be found, or whether she will simply become another forgotten obsession of the viral internet age, is unknown. Dr. Delille admits that in light of the current number of infected patients, locating ARAMIS Girl is no longer essential to reconstructing the spread of the disease.
“But if this young woman is still alive, I hope that she receives the support she needs. We seem to have forgotten that there’s a real person at the bottom of all this.”
EDITH
JULY 2020
Edith is not the name of a pretty girl. It is an old-fashioned name, an old woman’s name. People hear her name and think of grandmothers, of loosely gummed dentures and brown shoes squared off into stiff, orthopedic contours, of starched doilies and handwritten notes in medical charts that read No heroic measures.
Edith grasps this fact about her name at the age of ten and begins insisting that she be called Ed. It is not very much of a change, she explains, not very much to demand of the people who brought her over from China and have defined her very existence with a word so unsuitable, so revolting, as to make her almost despise herself.