A sociology of Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about unprecedented changes, unsettling multiple facets of our existence. The seemingly ‘impossible’ has already happened: ‘the world as we knew it has stopped turning, whole countries are in a lockdown, many of us are confined to our homes facing an uncertain future in which, even if most of us survive, economic mega-crisis is likely’ (Žižek, 2020: 85). And this is only the beginning . . .

There will doubtless be opportunities for some to profit from this dystopian scenario, as ‘disaster capitalists’ (Klein, 2007) open up new markets and develop new commodities in the domains of preparedness, protection, policing and care (Preston and Firth, forthcoming). Authorities may also seek to centralise and consolidate their power during the emergency. Scholars have long raised concerns that both executive over-reach and the normalisation of the state of exception may become entrenched after disasters (Honig, 2009). Consequently, civil liberties can be curtailed in the longue durée. Some even see the Covid-19 pandemic as a front to achieve such ends (Agamben, 2020). Edward Snowden has warned that the state surveillance apparatus that has been mobilised to fight Covid-19 – AI-driven thermal scanners in China, facial recognition technologies in Russia – will be here to stay (Macaulay, 2020). And it won’t just be states who are looking to solidify their power. Corporations will do the same among the new ranks of tele-workers (Stokel-Walker, 2020). In reaction to these issues, on 23 April the Secretary-General of the United Nations tweeted: ‘#COVID19 is a public health emergency – that is fast becoming a human rights crisis’ (Guterres quoted in Wintour, 2020).

Jens Zinn (2020) has also written of Ulrich Beck’s conceptualisation of risk society as ‘a new social condition, in which the state of exception becomes the new normal’. Simply stated, Beck suggests that we are now facing the unintended consequences of industrial modernity; that we can no longer predict or control the very threats that we have created. However discourses of risk tend to be one dimensional. Ziauddan Sardar (2010: 437) raises precisely this point. He takes the example of swine flu, which had been primarily discussed in relation to risk, presented as actual or perceived harm. But, as Sardar pointed out, swine flu is also about globalisation, intensive agriculture, multinational corporations, consumption patterns, international travel and medical education. The epicentre of the major outbreak at Sardar’s time of writing was close to La Gloria, Mexico, on the doorstep of a large industrial pig farm owned by the world’s biggest pig farmer, Smithfield Foods. That it produces meat on such a scale shows that there is consumer demand for it; that the flu spread so far so rapidly shows the number of mobile citizens jetting around the world for business or pleasure; and that governments had to undertake extensive public health campaigns shows the level of concern and/or contamination. Risk is clearly part of the landscape, but it is not the entire picture, and we do little to understand the place of risks in our world if we do not scrutinise the very things that produce them. As sociologists we should identify the factors responsible for the production of vulnerability.

Larry Brilliant, one of the World Health Organization (WHO) figures central to the eradication of smallpox, observed that ‘Outbreaks are inevitable. Pandemics are optional’ (quoted in Matthewman, 2015: 27). Weak health systems are an obvious problem. Other factors loom large. Intensive capitalist agricultural production is a breeding ground for novel pathogens. Its reliance on domesticated monocultures also works against the existence of immunity, facilitating transmission. Increasing urban density allows such diseases to spread quickly, while labour migrations and global commodity circuits work as vectors which take them far from their place of origin. Capitalist expansion into new regions also creates problems. Animals are driven out of their habitats into new domains where they may come into contact with isolated disease strains. These animals may also become new sources of commodification. And expansion means that humans may live in closer proximity to them. In many parts of the world unregulated agribusiness adjoins city-edge slums (Wallace, 2016). All of this increases the prospect of cross-species transmission (zoonosis).

Fortunately, the news is not uniformly bad. As George Monbiot (2020) notes, we are also seeing the rise of people power the world over, from the young volunteers in Hyderabad who are provisioning the city’s precarious workers with food packages, to the helpers in Wuhan who are ferrying essential medical workers between hospital and home, to the programmers in Latvia who organised a hackathon to create optimal face shield components for 3D printers, to the student babysitting service in Prague, and those groups internationally who are picking up medical supplies for the elderly. ‘The shift is even more interesting than it first appears’, Monbiot (2020) writes, ‘Power has migrated not just from private money to the state, but from both market and state to another place altogether: the commons. All over the world, communities have mobilised where governments have failed.’ A Kudos Organisational Dynamics survey of 1000 people found that 81% of respondents thought that the coronavirus pandemic will leave behind a society that has learned good lessons about ‘being in it together and being kind,’ while 88% of those surveyed believed that this sense of community would either continue or grow post-lockdown (Lourens, 2020: 2–3).

This outpouring of goodwill should not surprise us. First, disasters are essentially social phenomena. Threats and experiences of such are public and shared. Collective adversity creates social solidarity. This bonds people, providing the basis for physical and emotional support. We are all in this together. Second, collective action can be further encouraged as current power structures are nowhere near as robust as is commonly thought. The realisation that official assistance is seldom in the right place at the right time in sufficient numbers gives civil society a boost. Third, we are essentially social beings. We cannot exist alone. We are products of culture and collective labour. We are, to a degree unknown among any other species, remarkably altruistic. Contra the mantra of the neoliberals, Rebecca Solnit (2009: 305–6) concludes that we are resilient and generous, committed to the possibility of doing things differently, desiring of human connection and purpose. In disasters, then, a peculiar social energy emerges. Rendering assistance of all types gives new definition to life – a reason for being – which is being for others.

We live in interesting times. Monbiot (2020) claims that ‘You can watch neoliberalism collapsing in real time.’ In the United States, Teen Vogue discusses the value of mutual aid, the virtues of Peter Kropotkin, and the deficiencies of Donald Trump (Diavolo, 2020). In New Zealand, a prominent right-wing commentator writes in the business pages of the national newspaper that ‘if you’re wanting to win a war, the system you’re looking for is effectively communism’ (Hooton, 2020: A17). Rob Campbell, chair of Tourism Holdings, SkyCity Entertainment and the Summerset Group, concurs: ‘there’s no one more socialist than a businessman who has had his business go bad. The hand goes out to government pretty quickly’ (quoted in Fox, 2020: C5). Even the Editorial Board of the Financial Times (2020) have called time on the neoliberal project:

Radical reforms – reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades – will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.

As the discipline charged with making sense of contemporary social cohesion and transformation, sociology is well placed to comment on coronavirus and its profound consequences. Ever since Émile Durkheim’s (2002 [1897]) pioneering work we have known that misfortune is socially patterned. Victimology records this: the isolated, weak, minorities and the less wealthy consistently fare worse in disaster situations (Matthewman, 2015: 20–1). Infection fatality rate (IFR) is correlated with age. The elderly are feeling coronavirus’ physical impacts the most. In terms of social impacts, it could be that the youth are most affected by the lockdown. They are having to forgo work and their education is being compromised (Financial Times, 2020). The pandemic is racialised. Asians are being scapegoated and attacked, for spreading the virus (Tavernise and Oppel Jr, 2020), while official statistics show marked differences between black and white IFRs (Timothy, 2020). Indigenous groups are also at great risk. In Aotearoa New Zealand the ‘estimated IFR for Māori is around 50% higher than non-Māori’ (Steyn et al., 2020). In Australia, the impact of Covid-19 on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is underscored by a traumatic history of post-invasion epidemics, ‘years of neglect and a failure to address social determinants of health’ (Rallah-Baker, 2000). As Paula Braverman (2020) wrote for the UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab: ‘Inequality is our pre-existing condition.’

There is an obvious gender component too. Women are on the frontline of coronavirus. The majority of the planet’s healthcare and social care workers are female. The WHO puts the figure at 70% (Boniol et al., 2019). And this statistic only considers paid care – the bulk of health care is actually unpaid and performed by women in the home (Battyany, 2020). Women perform over 75% of all of the world’s unpaid work (International Labour Organization, 2018: xxix) and we have seen the consequences of the unequal domestic division of labour in academic journals during Covid-19. Women scholars have been unable to produce as much research as their male colleagues while caring for relatives with the virus and while schools and childcare centres have been closed (Hutt, 2020). This has resulted in significant falls in their article authorship during the pandemic. It has been reported that there is up to a 50% drop in article submission by women authors in astrophysics and more than a 50% increase in submissions from men in political studies (Kitchener, 2020). At the Journal of Sociology, we have compared submission data from March to May in 2019 with the same period in 2020 and have calculated a 12.5% increase for men and a 25% decrease for women. Thus, the pandemic reveals and exaggerates the disadvantage that primary carers experience in building research careers. This is at a time when academics are anxious to cultivate their productivity – university budgets have been dramatically impacted by Covid-19 and mass job losses are expected. Yet, most Australian universities have treated their employees’ intensified caring obligations during the pandemic as an individual and private matter (Nash and Churchill, 2020).

In many (most?) parts of the world, job losses will also affect women far more than men. As New Zealand’s finance minister, Grant Robinson, noted: ‘There is a real gender impact of job loss; if you look particularly at a sector like tourism, hospitality, or retail, there is a disproportionate number of women in those industries’ (quoted in Watkins and Lourens, 2020: 3). In Australia, the Covid-19 economic downturn has been declared a ‘pink recession’ as more than half of those who have lost their jobs are women (Crabb, 2020). This makes this recession very different to those of the past, it has the potential to rewind the hard-won progress that women have made to increase their representation in the paid workforce. Writing in The Guardian, Moira Donegan (2020) voiced fears that the pandemic will undo generations of feminist progress. She concluded: ‘It is still not clear what life will look like after the pandemic, but it seems increasingly likely that much more of it will be confined to that place that women have been striving for decades to get out of: the house.’

Of course, official statistics only show us so much. What they occlude can be just as revealing. The Chair of the British Medical Association has condemned the British state’s failure to capture Covid-19 ethnicity data as a ‘scandal’ (Nagpaul quoted in Iqbal, 2020). The government’s own figures only record hospital deaths (the statistics office tallies them all), leading Caroline Abrahams, head of the charity Age UK, to say that the daily figures ‘are airbrushing older people out like they don’t matter’ (quoted in Associated Press, 2020). Many elderly people have been given precisely this message, particularly when the value of their lives is measured against the value of the economy. Leading from the front, the lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, told Fox News viewers that he would rather die than have public health interventions interfere with the economy. He felt that America’s grandparents would agree. He urged workers to get back to it, and the 70+ population to take care of themselves (Žižek, 2020: 101). Republican Representative Trey Hollingsworth, who is not in that age cohort, had a similar view: ‘it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter’ (quoted in LeBlanc, 2020).

Disasters are ripe for sociological intervention. Michael Guggenheim (2016: 6–7) urges us to see them as research sites to illuminate politics, as material events whose production needs to be understood, and as cosmopolitics which scrutinise the configuration of the world. ‘Disasters’, he writes, are ‘inherently political events because they pose questions about who should be allowed to re-compose the world and how’ (Guggenheim, 2014: 4). And as Slavoj Žižek (2020: 4) has said of our current crisis, ‘We will have to raise the key question: What is wrong with our system that we were caught unprepared by the catastrophe despite scientists warning us about it for years?’

Thinkers of various persuasions have noted that the truth only reveals itself in moments of rupture (Baudrillard, 2005: 16; Virilio, 1999: 89; Žižek, 2008: 144). What does this pandemic reveal? As noted in the discussion above, the pandemic has shown us the altruism of people and the preferences of the powerful (in terms of who and what counts). It also tells us something about the state of our world. People, non-human life-forms, information and commodities move. The ecosystems and earth systems that sustain us are also always in flux (Matthewman, 2017). Given global flows of goods and people the potential now exists for worldwide disasters. Pandemics do not respect political borders. You cannot build a wall to stop coronavirus. Ours is a cosmopolitan world, not one of national seclusion. ‘The coronavirus epidemic . . . signals the . . . fatal limit of nationalist populism which insists on full state sovereignty: it’s over with “America (or whoever) first!” since America can be saved only through global coordination and collaboration’ (Žižek, 2020: 68).

Sociologists also know that the jobs with the highest pay may be the least socially useful (Lawlor et al., 2009). Covid-19 has given us something of a status reversal, showing us who the truly essential workers are. It turns out that financial arbitrage does not put food on the table, nor does public relations cure the afflicted. In addition to healthcare professionals, the heroes of the lockdown have been the supermarket workers, the refuse collectors, the couriers and the cleaners. ‘These are our essential workers,’ said New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, ‘and I hope we continue to recognise them as that long after this pandemic has passed’ (quoted in 1 News, 2020).

It is too soon to reach conclusions about something which is still under way, but if nothing else the coronavirus pandemic tells us that the impossible happens, and that other ways of living are within our grasp. Governments have shown that they have the capacity to engage in creative policy making that could ensure a more equitable society, as was seen in the provision of free childcare in Australia. Thus, the pandemic forces a reimagination of the social; the ‘virus is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next’ (Roy, 2020). Community responses to Covid-19 the world over also affirm a point Albert Camus (1991: 150) made in the final chapter of his novel The Plague: ‘and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in [people] than to despise’.

This special issue aims to identify what we might learn through sociology as we determine the social impacts of Covid-19 and rethink our social worlds – each article or commentary piece focuses on a substantive area of study, including social theory, the economic impact in Māori and Pacific communities, the consequences for global sport, the genered impacts of Covid-19 and the machinations of the pharmaceutical industry. As a portal, the virus demands that we all think sociologically, in this special issue our team of scholars provide a guiding hand.