For most in the United States, the realities of the covid-19 pandemic hit home in March 2020. Businesses closed temporarily, industries moved as many employees as possible into work-from-home situations, schools began virtual education, grocery and food delivery became a safe and convenient way to acquire daily necessities, masks and social distancing became principle means for reducing the virus spread, and people escaped the monotony of their homes for outdoor spaces. In response to the arrival of covid-19 in the United States, there lacked coherent, cohesive, and comprehensive plan of attack from the federal government. Instead, states and municipalities were left to issue their own directives, using information from a variety of sources. This decentralized method of handling the pandemic resulted in reinterpretations of space, place, practices, policies, and spatial patterns.
One of the most significant shifts in perceptions of place during the pandemic became the distinction between places of risk and places of safety. There was little gray area. Risky places included both those that could be avoided under stay-at-home mandates, such as places of employment for nonessential workers, and those that were deemed vital to everyday life, such as grocery stores or the hospital. Home was generally considered safe from the pandemic, but for those who were living in abusive environments or in situations that lacked access to resources required for a basic standard of living, stay-at-home orders created new problems.
New geographies of power emerged at various scales. In his Forward to the 2013 special issue of The Geographical Review on catastrophic geographies, John Agnew writes that “disasters may just happen, but catastrophes are made” (Agnew Citation2013, 455). Michael Lewis in The Premonition (Citation2021) documents how deeply politicized public health has become in the United States, using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as an example. The bureaucratic and political convenience which, Lewis claims, has plagued the United States for decades, crippled the country as covid-19 spread exponentially among the population. In many states, mandates were issued by governors using the power of emergency orders, but these mandates were left to local officials to enforce. As Agnew describes in his article in this issue, the same federal government that failed to promote a comprehensive plan of attack also criticized the governors, like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who issued strict quarantines in their own states. Later in the pandemic, the politics of “opening up,” and the speed and pace with which that process should occur, was wrought with controversy. “Safe” and “risky” places deemed so early in the pandemic were perceived differently eight months later, and even more differently after vaccines were widely available. As geography has proven time and again, spaces and places are not stagnant. They change.
Finally, spatial patterns changed as the pandemic wore on. Third spaces, the spaces we interact with that are not home or work, morphed in type and area. In most cases, they shrunk substantially, as bowling allies, movie theaters, shopping malls, sports arenas, and concert halls closed. In other cases, parks, bike paths, forests, and other outdoor spaces became key third spaces, including for those who didn’t engage in outdoor activities regularly before. Living in low-density, small cities became an advantage, as the amount of open space could easily accommodate the local population. High-density areas like New York City, where open spaces are disproportionately limited compared to population size, were much more restricted.
This special issue on covid-19 seeks to explore the pandemic as relevant to geographers and those in related disciplines. The articles in this issue fall into three general categories: policies, practices, and patterns. The articles consider the perspective on the pandemic from the United States, as this country has endured a disproportionately high number of covid-19 cases and deaths.
At the national scale, understanding the geographic impacts of covid-19 requires, first, a consideration for the larger geopolitical context. John Agnew and Barney Warf provide this. Warf explores the neoliberalist environment in the United States that resulted in the catastrophic impact of the pandemic. He attributes decades of American exceptionalism, religiosity, anti-intellectualism, and the racial, ethnic, and social inequalities that have created a healthcare crisis in general, and high rates of homelessness and obesity to the poor position the United States was in to handle the pandemic. Agnew examines the spatial contradictions in American federalism, and a lack of action by the central government in particular, which contributed to inequality at various scales. The lack of a comprehensive response to the pandemic at the national level meant that those left to make decisions (states, local governments, law enforcement, and private agencies) differed and floundered in their approach.
As a result of polices (or lack thereof) at the national scale, covid-19 influenced particular practices at local scales. Qingfang Wang and Wei Kang analyze the impact of the pandemic on small business practices in 50 MSAs and the degree of vulnerability created by policy differences. While they ultimately conclude that neoliberalist policies create greater vulnerability in small businesses, they also found that where greater levels of small business assistance were present, infection rates were lower, and more businesses reported that they expected to recover from the economic slowdown. In other words, policies directly influenced practices and resiliency.
In another example, Sara Beth Keough considers how mask mandates created material cultures of acquisition, display, and disposal of masks during the pandemic. From the State of Michigan perspective, arguably one of the states with the strictest quarantine, mask, and social-distancing policies issued by the governor, Keough finds that the commodity value of masks changed drastically throughout the pandemic, along with the creative ways masks were obtained, worn, and disposed of over time. When masks were mandated, but in short supply, their commodity value was higher and more creative ways for obtaining them could be found. Yet, when production caught up to demand later in the pandemic, the creativity switched from methods of obtaining masks to ways in which individual identities and intentions were expressed through masks.
Finally, the pandemic created new spatial patterns of power and practice as it evolved. Samantha Friedman and Jin-Wook Lee map mortality in New York City neighborhoods by race, ethnicity, and nativity status, showing a hierarchy of impact. Important to note is that though high degrees of vulnerability exist in nonwhite neighborhoods of New York City, the underlying reasons for this variation are complex and uneven, the results of decades of structural and environmental racism, segregation, and disinvestment at multiple scales. At the national level, Patricia Solis and others explore the spatial patterns of governor actions during the pandemic’s first wave. They develop a series of models that link covid-19 mortality to state-level decisions and showing how the patchwork of state data and geographies hinder any sort of unified prediction.
These three categories of policies, practices, and patterns are not mutually exclusive, of course. We encourage you to read all the articles in this issue because, collectively, they create a more holistic, though arguably still incomplete, picture of the early part of the pandemic in the United States. Most authors who considered the federal-level response to the pandemic agree that the unwillingness to act and the lack of a comprehensive plan exacerbated inequalities that already existed for complex reasons. Policies and orders were issued, but the practices that ensued from them produced varied results and levels of success for reasons authors in this issue explain. Personal and political identities and values were expressed materially (through mask wearing, for example) and in reaction to (for or against) state and local policies, and performances by the federal government and its entities.
As of the publication of this special issue, the covid-19 pandemic is still with us. The Delta variant has forced cases to increase and left the entire world in a morass of uncertainty. Yet the variety of topics and perspectives animating these papers remain. They situate the covid-19 pandemic as a geographically salient contemporary issue and present opportunities to learn from and improve upon such crises that are likely to arise in the future.