The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed racial and class inequities in brutal ways. Gone are the early days when politicians might say that the virus affects us all equally. We can see in the statistics, in the losses, and in who fills up the hospital beds that this isn’t true. And just as the pandemic helped… Read more →
Tag: COVID-19
Misinformation, Vaccination, and “Medical Liberty” in the Age of COVID-19
Vaccination is of critical importance right now. At this moment, the United States is fighting an uphill battle against COVID-19, reaching over 100,000 cases a day and counting. Hospital systems are strained and the country’s morgues are cracking under the pressure of thousands of corpses waiting in trailers for burial. Meanwhile, the vacuum of national… Read more →
The Forgotten: Adults with Developmental Disabilities During COVID-19
“It’s time to put on hand sanitizer, Beth*,” I say as we get back in the car after visiting the park to see the ducks, or as she calls them, “QUACK QUACKS.” I reach for her hand and when the sanitizer touches her skin, she recoils. “Don’t you try! Don’t you try!” Beth exclaims, pulling… Read more →
Thucydides, Historical Solidarity, and Birth in the Pandemic
I never felt any particular fear for my safety, or my baby’s, during my first pregnancy in 2016. I felt even more confident as I prepared to give birth to my second child in the spring of 2020. This changed dramatically in mid March, when suddenly my due date at the end of April coincided… Read more →
Not Our First Rodeo: Reading Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider through the Lens of Denver Newspapers’ Coverage of the 1918 Flu Pandemic
Weathering the COVID-19 pandemic in Fort Worth, Texas, I’m continually dismayed by the ways that money and politics are prioritized over human life all around me. In November, for example, our mayor cheerfully hosted a national rodeo competition, bringing in thousands of tourists during a period when we had fewer than twenty available ICU beds… Read more →
The Essential Problem: Essential Workers Category and Vaccine Roll-Outs
In November, the American Medical Association (AMA) declared, “Racism is a threat to public health.” In doing so, the AMA finally stated outright what many of us in the humanities and social sciences have been saying for decades – “the primary drivers of racial health inequality are systemic and structural racism, racism and unconscious bias… Read more →
Death by Proxy: What Twentieth-Century Infant Mortality Discourses in Brazil Can Tell Us About COVID-19
When the global death toll of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic surpassed one million in late September, the United States and Brazil registered the world’s two highest death counts. In the wake of this grim milestone, media outlets in both countries circulated various analogies to make sense of the scale of human loss. In Brazil, one… Read more →
Post-Pandemic Architecture Needs to Be Healthier
As an architecture student, I’d normally be building a model in my studio on campus right now. Instead, six months into quarantine, I’m still sitting in my makeshift home office worrying about my friends and family. The death toll climbs every day and my mom, who has an autoimmune disorder, is in the high-risk population…. Read more →
The Problem with Pandemic Pay
Since March, my mother has worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, processing thousands of COVID-19 tests. As one of over 6,700 medical laboratory technologists working in Ontario, she works toward fulfilling the government’s quota of 16,000 tests per day. But my mother is not a stranger to long hours or the threat… Read more →
Mind the Gap: Motivational Pressure and a Gendered Pandemic
In the midst of the pandemic, articles by journalists, public figures, and scholars on how to capitalize on time spent at home have been rapidly increasing, particularly those with suggestions on improving productivity. These articles employ motivational pressure to push readers to invest in “who they want to become” post-coronavirus. Suggestions range from quarantine recipes… Read more →