Social Analysis and the COVID-19 Crisis

A Collective Journal

Suman Gupta, Richard Allen, Maitrayee Basu, Fabio Akcelrud Durão, Ayan-Yue Gupta, Milena Katsarska, Sebastian Schuller, John Seed, Peter H. Tu

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000260151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Public Health, Administration & Care

This book is a collective journal of the COVID-19 pandemic. With first-hand accounts of the pandemic as it unfolded, it explores the social and the political through the lens of the outbreak. Featuring contributors located in India, the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Bulgaria, the book presents us with simultaneous multiple histories of our time.

The volume documents the beginning of social distancing and lockdown measures adopted by countries around the world and analyses how these bore upon prevailing social conditions in specific locations. It presents the authors' personal observations in a lucid conversational style as they reflect on themes such as the reorganization of political debates and issues, the experience of the marginalized, theodicy, government policy responses, and shifts into digital space under lockdown, all of these under an overarching narrative of the healthcare and economic crisis facing the world.

A unique and engaging contribution, this book will be useful to students and researchers of sociology, public health, political economy, public policy, and comparative politics. It will also appeal to general readers interested in pandemic literature.

1
Contagion and questions

Summary: As a springboard for discussion, attention is drawn to the prevalence of TB as the most deadly infectious disease of our time. A parallel for TB to the measures for Covid-19 contagion is imagined. This offers an opportunity for interventions to dwell upon the distinctiveness of the Covid-19 outbreak, consider the different attitudes to TB and Covid-19, or reflect upon responses to the latter in specific locations and national contexts. Views from specific contexts are variously revealing of concerns foregrounded therein and of what the authors felt was significant on their own account. Later in the chapter, a number of questions are posed by way of structuring this journal’s approach to the crisis. Some immediate reactions are given, which effectively point toward themes which appear in subsequent chapters.

Suman Gupta (16 March 2020, Delhi, India)

Tuberculosis is the deadliest infectious disease of our time. The WHO estimates that in 2017 around 1.6 million persons died of TB and in 2018 1.5 million; each year around 10 million people are infected.¹

Suppose all the governments of the world decide that today is Day 1 for tracking the spread and fatalities of TB. They give out three numbers on Day 1: this many were confirmed as infected by TB today, this many died, and this many recovered. Each day thereafter, they keep adding up the tally of the day to the total to that point from Day 1. Or maybe this is done every hour. These three cumulative numbers keep growing for one week, then two weeks, then two months, and onwards. These numbers are blasted out on every TV channel, news outlet, office notice, government report, subway poster, bulletin board, social network feed … in a continuous shrill drone. Soon after Day 1 is declared, every country in the world sets up police and military and medical detective forces to track the pathway of TB contagion for every case reported; anyone suspected of possibly being in contact with someone who might have TB is quarantined; gigantic TB-suspect treatment centres are set up; symptom-screening is routinized in airports; docks, borders, and TB-intensive countries are blocked off …

TB has been around for a while. It’s a matter of putting a Day 1 and reeling out three numbers with no context.

Let’s get perverse. Let’s appoint a Day 1 for counting cumulatively the number of affected people and fatalities for any potential cause of death and keep bombarding everyone with these two figures – for domestic violence, traffic accidents, police custody deaths…. If one puts one’s mind to it, any of those might some time assume the proportions of a dangerous epidemic.

The trick, of course, is that we think we can prudently avoid the police or the abusive partner or speeding vehicle, but we can’t be sure that we can avoid TB. The initial symptoms are of the sort that everyone has experienced possibly once a year or more – sore throat, coughing, sneezing, low fever, muscle aches – not far from a severe case of hay fever. It is unassuming enough initially to be very close, very possible, almost inside you already. Its very familiarity now suddenly makes everything and everyone suspect; every situation opens up vulnerabilities. Ritualizing preventive measures – wash your hands, cover your mouth, and so on – assume a kind of magical efficacy without guarantees – it’s a bit like salvation: it’s good to do it, but doing it doesn’t mean you will be saved. Inanimate things assume a threatening spirit. Anything with a surface (and what’s a thing without a surface?) suddenly comes alive with bacteria that might kill me, anywhere, in public transport, film halls, school classrooms, shops, protest meetings, offices. A philosophy of ‘social distancing’ develops, avoidance of strangers and foreigners first and then avoidance of friends and comrades. Studied isolation and atomized communication become not just de rigueur but necessary.

Peter H. Tu (17 March 2020, Niskayuna, New York State, United States)

I take your point that TB is a bad actor. A few years back, my brother stopped by my house for a friendly visit just after returning from a Doctors Without Borders stint in Africa. It turns out that he contracted both malaria and tuberculosis. We all had to get tested for TB, and my brother had to go on a regimen of medication and evaluation. Of course, the upside is that TB is usually treatable if one has access to the right drugs. Unless there is significant close-quarters interaction, it is not too transmissive. In general, the older a virus or bacterium gets, the less lethal it becomes. So let me push back ever so slightly on your hint of ‘We are blowing this thing way out of proportion’ …

The problems with Covid-19 are:

• 1It is too new, and so we have no real remedy other than ventilators for those who are really suffering – in general, the flu and TB are treatable.
• 2Unlike the flu, which has a mortality rate of 0.1, Covid-19 may have a mortality rate of up to 2% (this number is not really known).²
• 3Each person that catches Covid-19 infects on average two other people (this is high), hence the doubling or exponential nature of this disease.³
• 4Of those that catch it, 15% may require hospitalization – if they don’t get access to a hospital bed with a ventilator, mortality rates go up really fast. This is why China had to build multiple hospitals in a matter of a week.⁴ In the United States, there are roughly 1 million hospital beds, of which 75% are currently in use.⁵ In the United States, healthcare is a business. They follow the argument that you don’t build a church for Easter Sunday. So the current fear is that the exponential growth of infection + 15% hospitalization rate could easily overwhelm the nation’s capacity for intensive care. Hence the desire to flatten and spread out the curve.
• 5Of course, Covid-19 comes from the heart of the orient and thus has the taint of being intrinsically evil, if not existential in its menace.

We just got an email that one of the kids in the local elementary school has just tested positive for Covid-19. All children, parents, and staff have now been asked to go into a 14-day quarantine.

I have always been a fan of the zombie film genre. I particularly enjoy the Walking Dead franchise. One can’t help but feel that there is something zombiesque going on here. In particular, children and teenagers are more frightening than ever. Since they seem to be more resilient to this affliction, they take on an air of carefree-super-spreaders. Being over 50 and having a mild case of asthma, I find myself counted amongst those that must cower in the shadows in mortal fear of such inadvertent monsters. It is like being trapped in an endless Halloween. One blessing is that J and his posse very much enjoy the online gaming lifestyle. Other than the fact that his soccer club has had to end its season prematurely, I don’t think he even notices that we are in a lockdown situation. Maybe evolution has elected to select for the gamers …

K is in her element. Once she got wind of this virus (December or January timeframe?), she has been in preparation mode. While I would not put us in the ranks of panicky hoarders, we do have an impressive collection of canned foods and dried goods. She decided to upgrade our refrigerator and has purchased a large standalone freezer unit. On my part, I have now transformed the living room into a remote office of sorts. I have two card tables, a power bar, my laptop, and a spare screen. I am just a few clicks away from commandeering the house printer.

It’s only day 2 of my voluntary cloistering, but clearly I too am beginning to get bored with this arrangement …

John Seed (18 March 2020, London, United Kingdom)

You are absolutely right, Suman. I suppose it’s the difference between a long-term situation and a sudden EVENT. It’s the sudden explosion of Covid-19 that blew health provision in Northern Italy apart.⁶

And it matters in a different way as an event because Covid-19 is democratic. Suddenly the rich and powerful are as at risk (more or less) as the poor and powerless. Money no longer functions as part of their immune system. This was a lesson the British bourgeoisie learned in the 19th century. Starvation wages and filthy slums had a direct effect on them in the form of cholera, typhus, and so on.⁷ They and their families were not safe even in green well-policed suburbs on the edge of town. Public health and medical facilities for all were grudgingly and slowly conceded.

So will the US bourgeoisie finally learn it now? I doubt it. In the United Kingdom, there’s panic-buying of toilet paper;⁸ in the United States, apparently there’s been panic-buying of guns.⁹ I gather there are still those who think it’s fake news. The right and need to carry arms and the hostility to a national health service express the same bone-headed individualism. I suppose if they could invade foreign countries individually they wouldn’t need to pay taxes for an army. But war and pillage require a degree of social cooperation and collective action.

It’s interesting to see how fear and stupidity combine to generate amazing paranoid fantasies and delusions. I saw a YouTube video about the pandemic being a strategy for planned depopulation.¹⁰ And another of a scary American ‘news’ presenter claiming it was part of a conspiracy to harvest organs by the Chinese government.¹¹ Plenty of people think it’s a Chinese biological weapon, and plenty of others think it’s a US biological weapon planted in Wuhan. It’s nice for them that they think some branch of humanity is in charge.¹²

I read a message from a nurse in a big Liverpool hospital this morning saying that all leave has been cancelled, patients are being discharged, all non-urgent provision is cancelled, and the hospital is being put on a war footing. So it looks like the bomb of exponential growth is about to explode in the United Kingdom. It presumably goes off in London first.

My self-isolation is interrupted today for an emergency visit to the dentist. I almost look forward to it. I could get stir-crazy by the middle of next week

Milena Katsarska (18 March 2020, Plovdiv, Bulgaria)

The military, headed by General Ventsislav Mutafchiyski, and the Chief Prosecutor Ivan Geshev here are doing a good job of dealing with the Covid-19 threat firmly.¹³ Their major problem is tackling the two extreme positions of unthinking bravado and irrational panic. I quite appreciate how they arrested (1) a small group of drivers returning from Austria who broke the quarantine rule and went to have drinks in a local pub¹⁴ and (2) some British student from the Plovdiv Medical Academy who was spreading fake news online about a school with 200 cases he allegedly heard about at a briefing.¹⁵ Similarly, with regard to panic, they are holding constant information bulletins to repeat ad nauseam that neither copious amounts of toilet paper nor kilos of food packages nor heaps of antibiotics are necessary because there’s a regular supply. The Bulgarian people are unlikely to be left starving. Bulgaria doesn’t have a population of unemployed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the authors
• Introduction
• 1 Contagion and questions
• 2 Social distancing
• 3 Lockdown
• 4 Suspension of politics
• 5 Of protests
• 6 The poor and the way out
• 7 Religion
• 8 Exception and emergency
• 9 Real and digital space
• 10 Tax the rich
• Index