Covid’s Chronicities : From urgency to stasis in a pandemic era

Abstract

COVID-19 continues to cause severe morbidity and ongoing mortality. Covid’s Chronicities documents the shifts that have occurred in the face of the pandemic, the state and community responses to it, its continuing toll on health services, economies and communities, and its compounding effects on people’s health, lives and livelihoods.

This volume draws on research from across Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and Africa, providing surprising contrasts and consistencies of experience. As the pandemic has shifted from urgency to chronic unpredictability, everywhere people have struggled to make sense of state actions in infection control, testing strategies and the roll out of vaccines, and to remake social life. The contributing authors illustrate with poignancy how chronic social problems and pandemic effects have worked bidirectionally, compounding multiple inequalities and exacerbating, for some, despair and disassociation. They also demonstrate the ingenuity of communities – of Indigenous ways of knowing and providing care in some settings, and elsewhere, the power of robust local community networks and informal innovations. While this book exposes the pandemic’s exploitation of deep structures of state and societal neglect, and describes the resultant morass, it also illustrates the determination and imaginations of caring communities to withstand Covid’s harms.