The COVID-19 Crisis

Social Perspectives

Deborah Lupton, Karen Willis, Deborah Lupton, Karen Willis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367628956
• eBook ISBN: 9781000375916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

Since its emergence in early 2020, the COVID-19 crisis has affected every part of the world. Well beyond its health effects, the pandemic has wrought major changes in people's everyday lives as they confront restrictions imposed by physical distancing and consequences such as loss of work, working or learning from home and reduced contact with family and friends.

This edited collection covers a diverse range of experiences, practices and representations across international contexts and cultures (UK, Europe, North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand). Together, these contributions offer a rich account of COVID society. They provide snapshots of what life was like for people in a variety of situations and locations living through the first months of the novel coronavirus crisis, including discussion not only of health-related experiences but also the impact on family, work, social life and leisure activities. The socio-material dimensions of quotidian practices are highlighted: death rituals, dating apps, online musical performances, fitness and exercise practices, the role of windows, healthcare work, parenting children learning at home, moving in public space as a blind person and many more diverse topics are explored. In doing so, the authors surface the feelings of strangeness and challenges to norms of practice that were part of many people's experiences, highlighting the profound affective responses that accompanied the disruption to usual cultural forms of sociality and ritual in the wake of the COVID outbreak and restrictions on movement. The authors show how social relationships and social institutions were suspended, re-invented or transformed while social differences were brought to the fore.

At the macro level, the book includes localised and comparative analyses of political, health system and policy responses to the pandemic, and highlights the differences in representations and experiences of very different social groups, including people with disabilities, LGBTQI people, Dutch Muslim parents, healthcare workers in France and Australia, young adults living in northern Italy, performing artists and their audiences, exercisers in Australia and New Zealand, the Latin cultures of Spain and Italy, Asian-Americans and older people in Australia. This volume will appeal to undergraduates and postgraduates in sociology, cultural and media studies, medical humanities, anthropology, political science and cultural geography.

PART I

Introduction

1

COVID society

Introduction to the book

Deborah Lupton and Karen Willis

Introduction

In the early 1990s, the English translation of the German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s book Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Beck, 1992) introduced the concept of ‘risk society’ to sociologists and risk theorists internationally. Beck argued that processes of industrialisation and globalisation had led to a way of thinking in which people had become highly sensitised to the risks that had proliferated as an outcome of modernisation. His ‘risk society’ was a world in which ideas and understandings about selfhood, social relations and social institutions were increasingly framed through the lens of risk, associated with an intensifying sense of threat, danger and uncertainty and a desire to systematically manage these threats and insecurities. In an historical and geographical context in which environmental disasters (including the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster) dominated the risk landscape, Beck’s work focused on the hazards and uncertainties of pollution and climate change. He defined the ‘risks of modernisation’ as ‘irreversible threats to the life of plants, animals, and human beings’ (Beck, 1992: 13).

Beck’s risk society thesis sparked an outpouring of sociological work in the 1990s and early 2000s, in which social theory and empirical studies sought to identify how risks were generated, understood and managed as social processes (Lupton, 2013). In recent years, risk theory has lost much of its prominence – overtaken by other ‘turns’ in social theory and other preoccupations by social researchers. However, the COVID-19 crisis has brought social responses to risk into renewed prominence. Almost three decades after the publication of Risk Society, it could be argued that we are now living in a global ‘COVID society’. The emergence and rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic from the early months of 2020 has preoccupied public discourse and news media reporting and has sparked upheavals worldwide.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the first cases of an atypical viral pneumonia from an unknown cause was reported in a media statement by officials in Wuhan, China on the last day of 2019 (World Health Organization, 2020). WHO issued its first Disease Outbreak News report about these cases on 5 January 2020 and reported that the Chinese authorities had confirmed that the pathogen was a novel coronavirus. China reported the first death on 11 January and the first case outside China was reported by Thailand on 13 January. On 21 January, the possibility of human-to-human transmission was confirmed by WHO and the USA reported its first case of COVID. The first cases in Europe were reported by French authorities on 24 January. WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January and on 11 February announced that the novel coronavirus would be named SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it caused as COVID-19 (a contraction of ‘coronavirus disease 2019’). WHO declared that COVID-19 had reached pandemic status on 11 March, meaning that the epidemic had spread globally, crossing international borders and simultaneously affecting very large numbers of people in different parts of the world. At this point, Europe (and particularly Italy and Spain) had become the epicentre of the crisis. The UK, USA, Brazil and India were later to become the epicentres. By the end of June 2020, 10 million cases of infection with SARS-CoV-2 had been recorded globally, having doubled within six weeks, with over half a million confirmed deaths from COVID-19 (Du and Cortez, 2020).

No end is yet in sight for the pandemic, with global numbers continuing to rise, and many countries experiencing new surges of infections. The coronavirus has proven to be difficult to contain, once strict lockdown conditions are loosened. Greater tourist movements across national borders in the northern summer of 2020, for example, generated new surges of infection in countries such as Spain, Italy and France, while Australia’s second largest city, Melbourne, went into a second lockdown in July 2020 after quarantine measures for incoming travellers from overseas were badly mismanaged. By the end of September 2020, the grim global tally of over 1 million deaths from COVID-19 had been confirmed, from over 33 million confirmed cases. The USA was still the country with the highest COVID cases and deaths, but India was rapidly catching up, with Brazil and Russia following closely behind. The problems of those experiencing ‘long COVID’ illness were beginning to be documented, demonstrating that COVID-19 for some people was a long-lasting health problem (Mahase, 2020).

The COVID pandemic is far more than a massive global health problem – it is a crisis on every level: social, cultural, environmental and economic. As a zoonotic disease (originating in animals and transferring to humans), COVID-19 is a product of human-environment relationships (Braidotti, 2020): even to the point that some commentators have argued that the coronavirus is the planet’s revenge on humans for the damage it has sustained at our hands (Searle and Turnbull, 2020). However, the pandemic’s effects reach well beyond these relationships. Few areas of everyday life have been left unchanged in the wake of the emergence of this new infectious disease. The COVID crisis is a complex and ever-thickening entanglement of people with other living things, place, space, objects, time, discourse and culture.

Social impacts of COVID-19

When the pandemic began to erupt globally, it soon became evident that detailed and situated social research was vital to understanding how the crisis was affecting people across the world. Sociologists have been interested in the sociocultural and political dimensions of epidemics and pandemics for some time, pointing out how fear, moralism, blame and Othering are often major societal responses (Dingwall et al., 2013; Strong, 1990; van Loon, 2005; Bjørkdahl and Carlsen, 2019). In April 2020, Geoffrey Pleyers (2020), the vice president of research for the International Sociological Association, published what he called ‘a plea for global sociology in times of the coronavirus’. Pleyers noted that given the crisis had affected all dimensions of society – well beyond the health implications – responses to COVID required expertise in social research just as much as medical and public health expertise. He argued further that as the pandemic is a global phenomenon, a global perspective is required in addition to nation-based social research, so that researchers can learn from other countries’ experiences.

Political responses were crucial to how well nations fared in the first phase of the pandemic (Afsahi et al., 2020; Gugushvili et al., 2020). In what has been described as ‘biopolitical nationalism’ (de Kloet et al., 2020), many governments implemented strict controls over citizens’ movements and imposed surveillance and policing measures to enforce them. Nation-states retreated into themselves, erecting cordons sanitaire that in some cases segregated parts of cities as well imposing internal as well as international border controls in the attempt to control and contain the movements of human bodies infected with coronavirus (Afsahi et al., 2020). Citizens went through very different experiences of the COVID crisis based on how their governments and health officials reacted. Nations with liberal or populist leaders who failed to respond early enough with physical distancing measures, such as in the UK (Scambler, 2020), USA (Rocco et al., 2020; Thomson, 2020) and Brazil (Malta et al., 2020) floundered, recording far higher numbers of COVID infections and deaths (Gugushvili et al., 2020). Those countries where interventions were established earlier and with more extensive lockdown restrictions and border control measures, such as Taiwan, New Zealand, Vietnam, Australia, South Korea and Singapore, managed the spread of the pandemic much more successfully during its initial stages (Dalglish, 2020; Afsahi et al., 2020). There remains debate about countries such as Sweden, where the policy approach has been around ‘living with’ the virus and gaining ‘herd immunity’ (Pierre, 2020). All policy approaches have caused much debate about economic versus health outcomes – whether the longer term costs to societies of restrictions and lockdowns (caused by shutting down much economic activity) are outweighed by the health benefits in terms of reduced mortality, morbidity, and pressure on health systems.

Enforced quarantine, physical isolation, confinement to home, border closures, shutdowns of business, workplaces, schools and universities instituted in initial government responses to containing the spread of the virus have affected national economies, freedom of movement, familial and social relationships and mental wellbeing. Concepts of risk, uncertainty and trust suddenly had to be reassessed and confronted (Brown, 2020). It was obvious from the early months of the global spread of the coronavirus that while everyone was at risk from contracting the infection, in most countries some social groups were more at risk than others (Afsahi et al., 2020). These included groups that were already experiencing high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage, marginalisation and low access to health services, such as people with disabilities in Singapore and Australia (Goggin and Ellis, 2020), Indigenous Australians (Markham and Smith, 2020), Roma people in Europe (Matache and Bhabha, 2020), Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups in the UK (Bhatia, 2020), low caste and Muslim people in India (Rahman, 2020), Black Americans (Egede and Walker, 2020), Asian Americans (Roberto et al., 2020) and vulnerable and marginalised groups in Sweden, such as older people, immigrants and prisoners (Rambaree and Nässén, 2020). Gendered inequalities have also been exacerbated due to restrictions requiring working and learning from home. In many countries, women’s opportunities to engage in paid employment have been severely affected by caring responsibilities as they were forced to juggle working from home with supervising their children’s learning when schools were closed (Craig, 2020; Bahn et al., 2020; Al-Ali, 2020). Incidents of family violence have also escalated, with women finding it more difficult to seek help as they...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Introduction
• PART II: Space, the body and mobilities
• PART III: Intimacies, socialities and connections
• PART IV: Healthcare practices and systems
• PART V: Marginalisation and discrimination
• Index