From its first-recorded emergence in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, COVID-19 has spread quickly around the world. Not merely a health crisis, the COVID crisis has brought with it rapid and significant changes in people's everyday lives. Its impacts are currently felt in every geographical region of the world. While everyone is at risk from contracting the coronavirus, it has already become clear that differences in national governments’ responses to controlling the pandemic, combined with differing social, economic and institutional capacities to support disadvantaged groups, have led to starkly divergent successes in the management of the pandemic's health and social effects. The physical isolation, travel restrictions and quarantine measures introduced globally to control and contain the spread of the coronavirus have created contractions in most national economies, forced people to study, work and engage in leisure activities from home for many weeks, led to the highest rates of unemployment seen in many countries for decades, disrupted global supply chains, closed businesses, schools and campuses and consequently affected millions of people's livelihoods and wellbeing beyond those who have fallen ill with or died from COVID-19.
The World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 could be characterised as a pandemic on 11 March 2020. With the conviction that documenting the social responses to and effects of the COVID-19 crisis was important from its earliest stages, Health Sociology Review decided to devote a special section of the journal to the theme of ‘Sociology and the COVID-19 Pandemic’. Less than two weeks after COVID-19 had been declared a pandemic, our call for abstracts went out, with a timeline for submission, peer review and publication designed to publish the special section as quickly as possible. To encourage rapid turnarounds, we also chose to invite articles that were shorter than the usual piece published in this journal. We received close to 150 abstracts from a diverse range of countries and had to choose from among many excellent proposals to whittle down the final number to go forward for submission. In selecting the contributions, we decided to maintain an international focus as well as balancing contributions from early career and established scholars and ensuring a spread of topics. Consequently, the articles appearing in this special section present insights into the sociocultural and political dimensions of the COVID crisis in distinctly different political and geographical contexts.
Three contributions emphasise the situated symbolic, political and cultural elements of COVID responses in Global South countries. Alejandro Meza reflects on the discussions about risk, disease and dying that he had with women living in a neighbourhood in the Mexican city of Monterrey around the time that physical isolation measures were introduced. He shows how the existing precarious nature of the women's everyday lives together with their religious beliefs and folk understandings of illness influenced a certain fatalism in their thoughts and feelings about the risks of COVID. In his contribution, Henry Kwok offers a postcolonial critique to analyse the discourses and practices evident in the relationship between mainland China and Hong Kong during the first months of the COVID crisis. Kwok highlights the symbolic and historical elements of the mounting political tensions between these regions related to Chinese control of Hong Kong that were well in place before the pandemic erupted. Sabina Rahman's article turns to the social problems of the Indian state, including the lingering effects of the entrenched caste and patriarchal system and the inadequacy of the health and social services. She identifies the exacerbation of social discrimination, hatred and violence against the poor and ethnic/racial minorities in India in the early phase of the government's response to COVID.
Moving to the Global North, the macro-political dimensions of COVID governance are emphasised by Graham Scambler's and Kelly Thomson's contributions. Scambler considers how the COVID crisis has fractured social norms in the UK, revealing the deep divisions in this wealthy country. In so doing, he highlights the deficiencies of Boris Johnson's Conservative government in its initial reliance on the strategy of ‘herd immunity’: leading eventually to the UK recording figures among the highest death rates among wealthy countries. Thomson turns the spotlight on to gender: specifically, comparing performances of hegemonic masculinity by US President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Her analysis demonstrates how patriarchy has operated to define the very different approaches taken by these men in leading their nations’ responses to the COVID crisis.
Adopting a bottom-up approach in her contribution, Annika Richterich engages with critical making theory in examining how UK-based hacker and maker communities attempted to use their technical skills to supplement the production of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers at a time in which there was a shortage. She reflects on the practical and ethical implications of civil society groups such as these attempting to provide solutions for governments’ failure to adequately provide such vital equipment. Disability and disableism are addressed in the article contributed by Gerard Goggin and Katie Ellis, focusing particularly on the Singaporean and Australian settings. Drawing on critical disability and biopolitics scholarship, these authors argue that the voice and needs of people with disabilities has often been lost in public discussions of the effects of the COVID crisis, including portrayals of the ‘new normal’ of physical isolation, which for many people with disabilities is the usual state of exclusion in which they are forced to live.
Taken together, these seven short contributions begin an important conversation on the sociocultural and political dimensions of the COVID crisis that surface the broader tensions, practices and beliefs that have characterised responses across nations. There are, of course, many more issues to investigate and changes to document as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc around the world. This special section is just a start. We hope to see many more discussions of ‘COVID societies’ forthcoming in this journal.