More than viral: outsiders, Others, and the illusions of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

While necessary to control the pandemic and protect human life, the dominant virus-focused response to COVID-19 is ill-equipped to deal with growing xenophobia and racism, as well as the systemic vulnerabilities that turned a local disease outbreak into a pandemic. This paper draws from work on pathological life and disease ontology in arguing that the COVID-19 pandemic requires both a viral and a more-than-viral response. A pathogen-focused response on its own sustains illusions that this pandemic has a single origin point and an isolated local cause. A complementary relational response to the COVID-19 emergency would help challenge these illusions by attending to the social, ecological, and political circumstances in which the pandemic – and xenophobic and racist reactions to it – have taken place.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• xenophobia
• racism
• disease diagrams
• relational geography

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Tim Oakes and Craig Young for their helpful comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. COVID-19 data here and following come from Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering data repository available at https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19.

2. The original post, “Yang laji fenlei tujian 洋垃圾分类图鉴,” has been deleted, but an archived copy is available at https://project-gutenberg.github.io/Pincong/post/8c9f981cb8c73cf01475dcd8c1ac37c2/

3. Research still in review suggests SARS-COV-2 was “pre-adapted” to humans when it emerged in December 2019, though still likely resulted from a single human transmission (Zhan, Shing Hei, Benjamin E. Deverman, and Yujia Alina Chan. 2020. “SARS-CoV-2 Is Well Adapted for Humans. What Does This Mean for Re-Emergence?” BioRxiv, May 2. doi:10.1101/2020.05.01.073262).