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, recovered and managed to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming a pilot and (spoiler alert) finding a lost Arctic expedition. Others were not as lucky: Spanish flu claimed approximately 2.7 million people in the new Soviet state ( Supotnitsky 2006 , Egorov 2019 ). The death toll during the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia hovers at the moment of writing around 500,000 ( Meduza 2022 ), but the Russian population
extensive experience in situations of human distress such as armed conflicts, epidemics and natural disasters in lower income countries – were completely unprepared to face a crisis of this magnitude. From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the few certainties was that the risk of serious disease increased with age and comorbidities, therefore older residents in care homes would be particularly vulnerable. In these centres, many residents live together in closed spaces
Research into the governance of dead bodies, primarily focused on post-conflict contexts, has often focused on the aspects of the management of dead bodies that involve routinisation, bureaucratisation and order. Less attention has been paid to the governance of the dead in times of relative peace and, in particular, to the aspects of such work that are less bureaucratised and controlled. This article explores the governance of dead bodies in pandemic times – times which although extraordinary, put stress on ordinary systems in ways that are revealing of power and politics. Observations for this article come from over fifteen years of ethnographic research at a medical examiner’s office in Arizona, along with ten focused interviews in 2020 with medico-legal authorities and funeral directors specifically about the COVID-19 pandemic. The author argues that the pandemic revealed the ways in which the deathcare industry in the United States is an unregulated, decentralised and ambiguous space.
Both historical and contemporary records of mass contagion provide occasions for visibility to persons who otherwise remain little recognised and even less studied: those who bury the dead. While global reports attest to self-advocacy among cemetery workers in the current COVID-19 pandemic, the psychological complexities of their labour go virtually unseen. Findings on the experiences of those doing such work reveal a striking contrast. While societal disavowal often renders their task as abject and forgettable, those who inter the remains frequently report affective connections to the dead that powerfully, and poignantly, undermine this erasure. Acknowledging such empathic relationality allows us to look at this profession in areas where it has never been considered, such as psychoanalytic work on ‘mentalisation’ or in contemporary ethics. The article concludes with an example from the accounts of those who have buried the dead in the massed graves on New York’s Hart Island.
Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has been primarily a health emergency – a potentially fatal infectious disease, causing respiratory illnesses that can vary in severity. However, as witnessed during previous epidemics and pandemics ( Evans, 1988 ; Kleinnman and Watson, 2006 ; Qui et al. , 2018 ), COVID-19 proved to be much more than a health emergency, with serious social, political and economic consequences. While the COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed multiple fault lines in the performances of health services at every level – from community to national to global – in ensuring universal, equitable access to preventive and curative care. Tragically, this has been to the detriment of those who have suffered and died not only from COVID-19, but also from the myriad other ailments affecting people around the world. Of those, we wish to highlight here some key categories of diseases that have caused a greater
disability and vice versa. 7 Neglect of underlying social and economic determinants reduces all healthcare service impact. The interconnection has become painfully apparent during the current COVID-19 pandemic, with the novel coronavirus compounding and complicating the disease burden among the poor. For example, UK research revealed that people with hypertension, diabetes and obesity are at higher risk of poor virus outcomes ( The Health Foundation, 2020 ; Public Health England, 2020
Background In June 2020, a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) initiated a project to better understand and respond to health misinformation in humanitarian settings. Along with the global surge in morbidity and mortality, COVID-19 brought a deluge of health misinformation – including in the communities that our teams work in across the world. To
In this postscript, we want first to comment on the global character of COVID-19. Then we shall follow the four sections of Saving sick Britain so as to draw some parallels between this pandemic and what we have been calling the modern plagues. The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the global character of viral diseases, while this book has largely focussed on the common long-term conditions in an insular, even Anglo-centric, fashion. The reasons for our focus were not only because we felt we had to recognise the reality of rising parochialism in Britain but
five-month suspension caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We established a social science team which worked in collaboration with the trial to explore local experiences of the trial. The aim was to produce academic research that could help inform the intervention, while also providing critique and maintaining academic independence. This required a delicate balance: the social science study remained distinct from the community engagement activities of the trial