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COVID-19
Social consequences and cultural adaptations
J. Michael Ryan
The SARS-CoV-2 virus, commonly referred to as COVID-19, is perhaps the greatest threat to life, and lifestyles, the world has known in more than a century. The first case of a “pneumonia with an unknown cause” was reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) by the Chinese authorities on December 31, 2019. The WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic some three months later on March 11, 2020 (though they had already labeled it a “public health emergency of international concern” as early as January 30). There are now few, if any, people on the planet that have not in some way been impacted either directly by the virus itself or by the series of lockdowns and preventative measures that have been put in place to control it. It is, with little argument, the pandemic that will mark a generation.
As of mid-October 2020, there were some 40 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide and more than 1 million confirmed deaths related to the virus. And while more than half of those cases are in just three countries – the USA, Brazil, and India – there is arguably no country on the planet that has not felt the major impacts of the pandemic. This has been the most widely responded to (emphasis on “responded to”) global pandemic in generations.
From the time the first case was officially reported to the WHO, it took just over three months for there to be 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 around the world (which happened on March 7); just 12 days to double that number (March 19); and just three more days to reach 300,000 (March 22). Less than two weeks later, confirmed cases topped 1 million (April 2) and less than two weeks after that they topped 2 million (April 15). Just over a month later cases had already reached 5 million (May 21), doubling to 10 million just 38 days later (on June 28), and doubling again to 20 million just 44 days after that (August 10). It took more time for the number of cases to climb from one to 100,000 than it did for them to climb from 10 million to 20 million. From another perspective, while it took more than 180 days to reach 10 million confirmed cases, it took just 44 more days to reach 20 million. The spread of the virus on a global level has undoubtedly been exponential rather than arithmetic.
No doubt by the time this volume appears in print, the numbers will be greater still. It is also important to note the key word of “confirmed,” as it is certain that there have been far more cases, and far more deaths, directly related to COVID-19 than official numbers have captured. This is in part due to the ongoing global shortage of COVID-19 testing, the reluctance and/or inability of many counties to properly report accurate numbers (we have, in fact, seen the numbers of many countries increase as testing and reporting improved), and the nearly universal recommendation in light of shortages of testing, hospital accommodations, and other socio-medical deficiencies that those with mild symptoms stay home (thereby not allowing for inclusion in official tallies).
Perhaps more insightful of our status as a global human community than the reported numbers of cases and deaths has been the extreme variation in ways that different communities have responded to the crisis. In addition to being a global medical pandemic, COVID-19 has done much to reveal the ways in which we as human beings sharing a single planet view ourselves in terms of nation-states, races, ages, institutions, political ideologies, social classes, and, indeed, members of a shared humanity. While the pandemic has brought humanity together in some noteworthy ways, it has also laid bare many of the systemic inequalities that lay at the foundation of our global society.
The impact of the virus has spread well beyond the realm of the medical, also heavily affecting social, cultural, economic, political, and quotidian ways of living for nearly every human being on the planet. It has impacted not just the way we live today, but also the ways we will be able to live tomorrow. As a sociologist, I had initially placed calls for contributions to a volume on the sociology of COVID-19. Given the outpouring of interest from researchers across a broad range of fields, I later realized how short-sighted this call was to the humanitarian interests at hand and redirected the focus of the volume to a broader interest in all aspects of the causes and consequences of the virus, and, even more so, to the impact of responses to it. The great number of high-caliber proposals also prompted me to push for the creation of two separate, though highly interrelated, volumes in order to be able to help bring more of this high quality work to print.
This volume, COVID-19: Social Consequences and Cultural Adaptations, addresses issues related to institutional adaptations, communal consequences, cultural adaptations, and unveiling social inequalities. The chapters in this volume address such critical issues as the future of institutions of higher learning, local responses to a global pandemic, culture changes related to the call to utilize personal protective equipment, and the impact of the virus on racial, gender, and sexual minority populations.
The companion volume, COVID-19: Global Pandemic, Societal Responses, Ideological Solutions, addresses issues related to ethics and ideologies, exacerbating inequalities, and social responses to crisis. The chapters contained within that volume address such critical issues as poverty work amidst the pandemic, environmental impacts, changes in the understanding and application of key social scientific theoretical perspectives, and how the novelty of the virus has increasingly become accepted as commonplace.
Together, these two volumes represent a timely and critical advance in knowledge related to what many believe to be the greatest threat to global ways of being in more than a century. They represent the collaboration of some of the leading social scientists from across the globe, including sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, historians, economists, scholars of race and ethnicity, sex and gender, class and inequality, and the work of leading social activists and scholars committed to social justice. The scholarship in the two volumes represents contributions from nearly a dozen countries across five continents and includes contributions from many well-known, high-profile scholars (e.g., George Ritzer, Bryan Turner, Serena Nanda, and Melissa A. Milkie) as well as top-notch contributions from well-established and up-and-coming researchers from a variety of fields.
It is imperative that academics take their rightful place alongside medical professionals as the world attempts to figure out how to deal with the current global pandemic and how society might move forward in the future. These volumes represent a response to that imperative.
Introduction to chapters
In the second chapter of the volume, Ryan begins by highlighting the important distinction between SARS-CoV-2 as a virus and COVID-19 as a pandemic. He further highlights potential reasons why this particular virus and the associated pandemic are receiving such unprecedented attention. Ryan goes on to discuss the tenuous reasons why this pandemic might contain some silver linings, further unpacks a small portion of the reasons why this pandemic is inarguably a bad thing, and explores some of the as-yet unknowns related to the pandemic as it exists today. Ryan concludes with some thoughts as to potential future impacts and possible directions as to where we, as a global community, can go from here.
In the third chapter, “Rethinking What We Value: Pandemic Teaching and the Art of Letting Go,” sociologist Deborah J. Cohan draws on themes gleaned from her memoir that was published less than a month before the pandemic put a chokehold on our lives. Reflecting on the central lessons from the memoir, she creatively uses these to make sense of the pitfalls, priorities, and possibilities of pedagogical shifts in pandemic teaching. As educators around the world seek to find not only new ways of doing their work, but new ways of finding meaning in doing so, Cohan’s insights serve as a practical, moral, and therapeutic guide to teaching in the era of pandemic.
The sudden transition to online instruction mid-semester at traditional, residential colleges and universities due to the COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented challenges for students and faculty. In Chapter 4, “Disruption and Difficulty: Student and Faculty Perceptions of the Transition to Online Instruction in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Lee Millar Bidwell and her co-authors draw on two sets of surveys distributed to faculty and students to analyze faculty and student perceptions and experiences of the abrupt move to online instruction. Their findings indicate that students and faculty agreed that the move to online instruction was necessary and that online learning is less effective than face-to-face instruction; however, they also indicate that faculty misjudged the degree to which students were concerned about balancing work, school, and family obligations and changes to course material. The authors conclude by recommending better emergency planning by and communication from university administrators as necessary to facilitate a more seamless response to unforeseen events.
Building on the aforementioned themes, Adam G. Sanford and his co-authors in Chapter 5, “Seeking Stability in Unstable Times: COVID-19 and the Bureaucratic Mindset,” argue that as a bureaucracy, higher education is ill-suited to make rapid changes such as those demanded by COVID-19. They draw on the works of Weber, Lenski, Durkheim, Garfinkel, and Sanford to explain bureaucraticity, or the bureaucratic culture and mindset; how its norms of assembly, rules, rule-makers, rule-enforcers, and standards were disrupted by the onset of the international pandemic; and how some types of bureaucratic norms and actors worsened, rather than improved, institutional response to the pandemic. They conclude by suggesting avenues for further research into remedies for bureaucracies when confronted with unavoidable and sudden change, noting that novel problems demand nuanced solutions and that this creates a conflict for bureaucracies, where simple, rapid solutions are the default.
Policing has become a global health crisis. In Chapter 6, “The Solution Is the Problem: What a Pandemic Can Reveal About Policing,” Jodie Dewey argues that though global pandemics and police-involved deaths appear to be separate problems, they become interconnected when the government transforms a health crisis into a criminal justice problem. Dewey further argues that the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed enduring health disparities among communities already experiencing the negative effects of aggressive police tactics and shows how protests against police violence and police responses to those protests both help further spread the virus.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare providers have made stay-at-home orders to help minimize the spread of the virus. This has been a particularly problematic public health intervention for those experiencing homelessness as well as those who provide services to the homeless. In Chapter 7, “Housing as Health Care: Mitigations of Homelessness During a Pandemic,” Kristen Desjarlais-deKlerk examines the ways in which three different Canadian cities have responded to the needs of their unique homeless populations and the types of interventions they have enacted. In doing so, she highlights the importance of housing, demonstrates differences in responses, displays the types of risks identified, and cites the ways in which providers have advocated for clients experiencing homelessness.
In Chapter 8, “COVID-19 and Reproductive Injustice: The Implications of Birthing Restrictions During a Global Pandemic,” Nazneen Kane draws on a reproductive justice framework to explore obstetric policy in the United States in the wake of COVID-19. Kane examines three core areas of the birth experience that are impacted by the pandemic – birth setting, birth support, and birth services – and explores the ways in which COVID-19 obstetric policies and practices heighten reproductive injustices and how these injustices map onto women’s lives in differential ways. Kane’s chapter further articulates the importance of considering the ways in which COVID-19 obstetric policies may result in higher rates of maternal mortality for birthing individuals of color.
In Chapter 9, “When Sports Stood Still: COVID-19 and the Lost Season,” Donna J. Barbie and her co-authors argue that although sports cannot distract or unite us through a particular tragedy, their suspension does present an opportunity to examine their importance in our culture. They argue that such an opportunity offers a chance to observe how deeply, if at all, we feel the loss, how we manage to cope and work around it, what we are finding to fill the void, and how this unprecedented event might change sports or how we view them and their place in our lives.
In response to COVID-19, nations have implemented a variety of quarantine measures restricting the movement of their population in order to combat the plague. These restrictions to contain COVID-19 are, by and large, universally supported by the global scientific community and healthcare experts. However, in the United States, a series of movements have emerged to protest these quarantine restrictions. In Chapter 10, “The Political Nightmare of the Plague: The Ironic Resistance of Anti-Quarantine Protesters,” James K. Meeker argues that these anti-quarantine movements are largely motivated by (a) anti-rational and (b) anti-governmental frames standing in contrast to the governmentality of the modern, rational state. Meeker further argues that the growth of these postmodern frames, as evidenced by quarantine protesters, suggests a political climate that is increasingly hostile to rational, scientific, and medical expertise. Rather than a surprise, therefore, it is consequently anticipated that public healthcare policies, such as implementing quarantines, shall be increasingly met with resistance and noncompliance.
Chapter 11, “Toxic Wild West Syndrome: Individual Rights vs. Community Needs” by Dinur Blum and colleagues, introduces the concept of Toxic Wild West Syndrome – the combination of performative rugged hyper-individualism, a weaponized display of strength, and nationalism framed as patriotism in the United States. The authors argue that citizen responses to COVID-19 have fallen into two general categories: prosocial/flexible and hyper-individualist/inflexible, and that while most people are prosocial: self-isolated, working “essential jobs,” or sheltering in place, a highly visible and audible minority falls into the hyper-individualist category: assembling in public to protest public health directives, which disrupt their cherished norms. Although the prosocial response is a larger group, the hyper-individualist response is louder and more visible. The authors call for extensive research into methods of penetrating and mitigating this inflexibility in order to maximize the safety of the population during this and future crises.
Since the 1918 flu pandemic, wearing masks during illness has been uncommon in many parts of the world. With the spread of the COVID-19 virus, however, this practice has been changing. From discouragement to adoption and promotion, the rise of mask-wearing behaviors is an unusually rapid cultural practice change. In Chapter 12, “Innovation Diffusion, Social Capital, and Mask Mobilization: Culture Change During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Heather L. Mello applies a “diffusion of innovations” and “social capital” approach to recent mask mobilization and draws on content and corpus analysis methods to examine the role played by formal and informal social relationships in the adoption and diffusion of mask wearing as a pandemic preventive behavior. Mello argues that widespread mask making, organizing, and distribution, and their cascading communication through social networks, played a positive role in this change and further argues that contradictory messaging by social media networks and change agents played a negative role and contributed to anti-mask attitudes and practices.
The COVID-19 pandemic powerfully altered parents’ time schedules and time pressures as their lives shifted in unique and unprecedented ways. In Chapter 13, “Changing Times: New Sources of Parenting Stress and the Shifting Meanings of Time With and for Children,” Melissa A. Milkie shows how three central forms of parents’ time during the pandemic – time parents spent with children, for children, and toward safeguarding children’s futures – was upended. Milkie illustrates how the pandemic transformed these aspects of time, increasing parents’ demands. Notably, the increased demands and pressures related to parental time varied by social class and gender. Looking toward the future, Milkie argues that there may be countervailing effects that lessen the blow of pandemic time stressors, as new meanings surrounding the value of spending time with and for children may develop among families and societies.
When home confinement protocols dramatically reduced face-to-face interaction opportunities as the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread around the globe in the spring of 2020, a group of young adult Deaf friends in Kazakhstan created an online WhatsApp group called “Antistress” where they began sharing information and providing mutual support. In Chapter 14, “Sites of Silence: Deaf Online Communication...
