Pandemic Pseudocide

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This is kind of a weird idea but I was thinking it today. Who else was going to think it? It's just a mental exercise of speculation.

I've noticed there is at least one YouTube channel that used to be active that became inactive earlier this year. The Sam O'Nella Academy currently has over 2.5 million subscribers and used to regularly post videos at least once every other month at minimum but hasn't uploaded any new videos since January 29, 2020. In his "The Wild World of Inuit Folklore" video posted late November 2019 the YouTuber described himself as a twenty year old college student living in Delaware.

Due to the pandemic that started around the time when the uploads seemed to stop one might fear the worst, However, the YouTuber also has a Twitter account that continued having updates until August 10.

sam_o.png

Source: https://twitter.com/Sam_ONella

Clearly not a victim of the current pandemic. But without the Twitter account that could be checked it wouldn't have been so unreasonable to consider that it was a possibility. Sometimes people just stop being active on a platform. At any other time it would have been hard to guess why but during the current pandemic one can fear the worst possible reason.

Sometimes a person might just want to disappear without a trace. The current pandemic is as good plausible cover as any. There is a WQikipedia entry about pseudocide. A person can fake their own death at any time but maybe a global pandemic might entice someone who is on the fence about whether or not to do it.

I can't find anything using internet searches yet about cases of anyone using the global pandemic to commit pseudocide. Maybe there's at least one case that hasn't been uncovered yet.



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