Opinion: In Ghana, Covid-19 feels like just another familiar health threat

Understanding how Covid-19 has been perceived in West African nations like Ghana is crucial to tackling it, says Professor Ama de-Graft Aikins (UCL Institute for Advanced Studies). In a comedy sketch that recently went viral on Ghanaian social media, Coronavirus arrives late to a meeting. "What's up, fellow deadly diseases," Coronavirus says, as Malaria, Cholera and AIDS jump up from their seats and rush for their face masks. The sketch illustrates how some people in Ghana are making sense of the pandemic. While Covid-19 is new and unique, for some it feels like just another on a list of long-standing and omnipresent threats to public health. Social psychologists often use the term "familiar alien threats" to describe situations that people actively distance themselves from in their minds because they represent disruption or danger. But these threats still change the way we think, feel and behave.