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Introduction The disease caused by a hitherto unknown coronavirus, and denoted coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was designated a pandemic on 11 March 2020 ( World Health Organization, 2020a ). The first case of COVID-19 was detected in Spain on 31 January 2020, and as of August 2021 there have been more than 4,500,000 cases and over 80,000 COVID-19 deaths in the country. Given the novelty of the virus, there was a lack of basic information about the
But where some saw abstraction others saw the truth. Albert Camus, The Plague In the concluding chapter of this book, some considerations will be given to what social, political, and economic changes need to be made, domestically and globally, after this pandemic crisis is over. The rhetoric of war, often used to describe our struggle with COVID-19, suggests that we must start thinking in terms of jus post bellum : if life resumes as if this COVID-19 episode was only a temporary glitch, and everything post COVID-19 goes back to being essentially
misfortunes. An injustice, on the other hand, is caused by fellow humans, not nature. An injustice, unlike a misfortune, is intentional, controllable, and therefore not blameless. Poverty is an injustice, not a misfortune. The impact of COVID-19 has a lot more to do with injustice than misfortune. At an intuitive level this distinction between an injustice and a misfortune makes sense, and yet actually distinguishing between the two can be profoundly problematic. 1 In her still relevant book The Faces of Injustice , first published thirty years ago, Judith Shklar
distancing, they may now be inclined not to trust them on the face mask issue. Other COVID-19 issues where experts disagree include the best time to enforce measures to restrict movement, whether there is significant COVID-19 airborne transmission, or how to flatten the curve of infections rather than merely delaying the peak. When experts disagree, politicians take centre stage, for better or worse. In Ireland in early October 2020 the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) recommended that the whole country move to Level 5, the highest alert level in the
There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2 + 2 = 4 is punished by death Albert Camus, The Plague In crises, we rely desperately on the truth, and there is no room for ‘post-truth’. Or at least, there shouldn’t be. But that’s not what we have seen with the COVID-19 pandemic. In the previous chapter we saw how populism tends to have a relaxed relationship with truth. In this chapter, the focus will switch to the phenomenon of fake news and post-truth, and how COVID-19 is not immune from this aspect of the global
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. Albert Camus, The Plague . Before we had COVID-19 we had populism. Until recently the popularity of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage in the UK, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and Marine Le Pen in France was unequivocal, but almost insignificant compared to that of Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. And that’s only in Europe. Modern-day populism is founded on a specific but crude and somewhat
As a result of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic, in 2020 forensic institutions in Mexico began using extreme measures in the treatment of bodies of confirmed or suspected cases, due to possible infection. A series of national protocols on how to deal with the virus were announced, yet forensic personnel have struggled to apply these, demonstrating the country’s forensics crisis. This article aims to reflect on two points: (1) the impact that COVID-19 protocols have had on how bodies confirmed as or suspected of being infected with the virus are handled in the forensic medical system; and (2) the particular treatment in cases where the body of the victim is unidentified, and the different effects the pandemic has had in terms of the relationship between the institutional environment and the family members of those who have died as a result of infection, or suspected infection, from COVID-19.
) Introduction This chapter investigates teletherapies, aiming to produce novel insights into how human well-being is co-constituted with technological infrastructures. 1 Drawing upon a study on the diverse practices of remote therapy and counselling in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it explores the ways in which Finnish psychotherapists and
spatial, dynamic aspects bring a unique dimension to the experience. But how does the physicality of performance poetry translate to digital space? While a long microphone cable might allow the poet to move around the stage and engage a ‘live’ audience, such dynamism might be lost via web broadcast or pre-recorded poetry performance. Responding to the sudden global behavioural shift enforced due to COVID-19, this chapter sheds light upon, and aims to advocate for, performance poetry outside of London – considering issues of
COVID-19 has reinstated the sovereign enclosures of corpse management that mothers of the disappeared had so successfully challenged in the past decade. To explore how moral duties toward the dead are being renegotiated due to COVID-19, this article puts forward the notion of biorecuperation, understood as an individualised form of forensic care for the dead made possible by the recovery of biological material. Public health imperatives that forbid direct contact with corpses due to the pandemic, interrupt the logics of biorecuperation. Our analysis is based on ten years of experience working with families of the disappeared in Mexico, ethnographic research within Mexico’s forensic science system and online interviews conducted with medics and forensic scientists working at the forefront of Mexico City’s pandemic. In the face of increasing risks of viral contagion and death, this article analyses old and new techniques designed to bypass the prohibitions imposed by the state and its monopoly over corpse management and identification.