my responsibility as a citizen during this pandemic essay

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The Many Ways We Helped Each Other During COVID

When the pandemic first came to California and lockdowns were instituted, many of my neighbors set out to help each other. Some called elderly neighbors to be sure they were OK. Others collaborated with local restaurants to create a low-cost food delivery service, feeding people around the city while helping restaurants find a source of income during closures. Still others began a drive to collect masks for essential workers.

These acts of altruism warmed my heart. But what motivated some neighbors to step up to do this, while others didn’t? And is altruism enough when it comes to disaster relief?

Those were the questions at the heart of a new study published in Analyses of Social Issues and Policy .

To better understand how altruism emerged during COVID-19, the researchers analyzed 104 stories of altruism appearing in major newspapers and blogs that were compiled by Ball State University between April and October 2020. They wanted to see if any themes emerged around who the helpers were, why they stepped up, whom they helped, and what kinds of help they offered. The ultimate goal was to paint a picture of how people ally with each other when disaster strikes and how they expand their sense of community.

“We were trying to understand how people come together,” says lead author Selin Tekin. “We wanted to know what kind of strategies people used to support each other and how the wider community can support those most affected.”

While some of the stories she and her team analyzed came from different parts of the world—India, Australia, and England, for example—the majority came from the United States, so the results are somewhat American-centric. But the stories do give a picture of a phenomenon that’s frequently seen when disaster strikes. 

“A sense of community often appears in disasters when there are not adequate responses from the authorities or the government, or when there are contradictory messages from the government,” says Tekin. “Community members come together and share whatever resources they have.”

How people stepped up during COVID

Here’s what Tekin and her colleagues found when analyzing the stories.

Who helped. Many people who helped others during the pandemic belonged to organizations, associations, and faith communities that generally provide help to others, although some were volunteers who spontaneously decided to help. And many were economically or physically advantaged.

It makes sense that organizations set up to provide assistance would do so during the pandemic, and many did, including Catholic Social Services of Alaska, for example. When it became clear homeless people in Anchorage would be at risk of catching COVID in crowded shelters, the organization searched for private places for homeless people to live and helped move them into safer quarters.

Others stepped up once they became aware that certain groups were disproportionately impacted by COVID. Those with greater economic resources gave more generously, while younger people tended to offer their labor. As an example, one Yale college student and his friend put together a group of 1,300 volunteers in 72 hours to deliver groceries and medicine to older New Yorkers and other vulnerable people.

Many people volunteered spontaneously, too, after seeing a pressing need. At one petrochemical plant , 43 employees volunteered to work 12-hour shifts for a month just to produce raw materials needed for face masks and surgical gowns. This kind of volunteer spirit was similar to what I saw with my neighbors—a response that is fairly typical, according to Tekin.

“There are always volunteers who are willing to help their communities,” she says.

Why people stepped up to help. The main reasons people chose to help were that they felt an emerging sense of identity with those most affected by COVID, they wanted to be an ally of disadvantaged groups, and they felt grateful for those risking their own health to help.

Research has shown that those who have a strong sense of “we are in it together” are more likely to help in a crisis than those who don’t, and that was true during COVID, too. In many instances, people expressed feeling a sense of identity with those who were suffering. For example, one artist in Los Angeles sent thousands of paintings of flowers to health care workers in New York City to let them know, “You’re loved by millions of people you’ll never meet. You’re not a stranger to anyone.”

There were also many examples of people wanting to help the disadvantaged. One café owner in Australia withdrew 10,000 Australian dollars from his bank and gave out $100 bills to people standing in line for the social security offices. In India, a group of women began cooking extra food for immigrant workers who were suffering during the lockdown.

In other cases, people wanted to express their thanks to those who were doing essential work during the pandemic. One neighborhood in Miami Beach organized an early-morning surprise for their garbage collectors, lining their street with people holding up signs and putting together gift bags, cards, and presents as a token of their gratitude.

Who was helped. The people most targeted for altruistic help were the elderly, those with health conditions or disabilities, essential workers, working-class people, or marginalized social groups.

For example, many store owners created special store hours when only the elderly or disabled could shop to reduce their risks of getting COVID. One woman created a mask that had a clear, plastic window over the mouth so that people who are deaf or hard of hearing could still use lip reading to understand those around them. When food insecurity rose during COVID, the FarmLink Project stepped up to deliver food that was being left unused at farms, delivering almost 240,000 pounds of food to food banks, and paid wages to farmworkers and other workers affected economically by COVID.

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How people were helped. People provided material help, support for psychological or physical well-being, and social-emotional support.

Some people donated money, cooked and distributed food, or ran errands for those who couldn’t leave their house. Others distributed masks to those who had trouble procuring them or offered free counseling services to those suffering emotionally. Still others made calls to lonely, isolated folks or participated in rituals aimed at thanking health care workers on the frontlines (like clapping from their balconies).

Of all of these findings, the latter surprised Tekin most. “I was fascinated by how, even if people can’t give any kind of material support, they show their gratitude; they show that they’re aware of the support that they are receiving,” she says.

She notes many working-class and ethnic minority populations were disproportionately affected by the pandemic and didn’t receive an adequate response from authorities. So, it was heartening to Tekin to see that, when confronted with an outside threat, people can choose to help, whether or not government authorities intervene.

“People share an emergent identity, a human identity,” she says. “Here, we saw people with more financial or material resources willing to share with the disproportionately affected. It wasn’t surprising, exactly, because we’d seen this in previous research. But it’s always interesting.”

Lessons for times of crisis

All in all, these patterns show that in a crisis, people do often step up to help one another. This is good news that can be obscured by news reports of less ideal behavior—like hoarding toilet paper or jumping the line for vaccinations. When there is a sense of common humanity—that we’re in it together—it can encourage more people to feel more moved to help.

“Even though the system is not structured in a way that everybody can receive the same amount of resources under the principles of equity, community members can come together and support each other,” says Tekin. “People just need to be aware of that.”

On the other hand, our altruistic impulses are not enough, says Tekin. As the pandemic drags on, people’s enthusiasm to give tends to wane, even though the need continues. To combat that, it’s incumbent upon community aid groups and government agencies to provide support to those who continue to suffer disproportionately, she says.

“You need change at the systemic level—policies that deal with injustice or that help community aid groups to be more sustainable, because they are usually the people who know their communities best,” says Tekin.

In the meantime, it’s good to see that people are usually capable of expanding their circle of care and stepping up to help.

“Though there is a gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged, there’s also support,” says Tekin. “People don’t always know what to do to help, but they’re willing to do something.”

About the Author

Jill Suttie

Jill Suttie, Psy.D. , is Greater Good ’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good .

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I Thought We’d Learned Nothing From the Pandemic. I Wasn’t Seeing the Full Picture

M y first home had a back door that opened to a concrete patio with a giant crack down the middle. When my sister and I played, I made sure to stay on the same side of the divide as her, just in case. The 1988 film The Land Before Time was one of the first movies I ever saw, and the image of the earth splintering into pieces planted its roots in my brain. I believed that, even in my own backyard, I could easily become the tiny Triceratops separated from her family, on the other side of the chasm, as everything crumbled into chaos.

Some 30 years later, I marvel at the eerie, unexpected ways that cartoonish nightmare came to life – not just for me and my family, but for all of us. The landscape was already covered in fissures well before COVID-19 made its way across the planet, but the pandemic applied pressure, and the cracks broke wide open, separating us from each other physically and ideologically. Under the weight of the crisis, we scattered and landed on such different patches of earth we could barely see each other’s faces, even when we squinted. We disagreed viciously with each other, about how to respond, but also about what was true.

Recently, someone asked me if we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, and my first thought was a flat no. Nothing. There was a time when I thought it would be the very thing to draw us together and catapult us – as a capital “S” Society – into a kinder future. It’s surreal to remember those early days when people rallied together, sewing masks for health care workers during critical shortages and gathering on balconies in cities from Dallas to New York City to clap and sing songs like “Yellow Submarine.” It felt like a giant lightning bolt shot across the sky, and for one breath, we all saw something that had been hidden in the dark – the inherent vulnerability in being human or maybe our inescapable connectedness .

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But it turns out, it was just a flash. The goodwill vanished as quickly as it appeared. A couple of years later, people feel lied to, abandoned, and all on their own. I’ve felt my own curiosity shrinking, my willingness to reach out waning , my ability to keep my hands open dwindling. I look out across the landscape and see selfishness and rage, burnt earth and so many dead bodies. Game over. We lost. And if we’ve already lost, why try?

Still, the question kept nagging me. I wondered, am I seeing the full picture? What happens when we focus not on the collective society but at one face, one story at a time? I’m not asking for a bow to minimize the suffering – a pretty flourish to put on top and make the whole thing “worth it.” Yuck. That’s not what we need. But I wondered about deep, quiet growth. The kind we feel in our bodies, relationships, homes, places of work, neighborhoods.

Like a walkie-talkie message sent to my allies on the ground, I posted a call on my Instagram. What do you see? What do you hear? What feels possible? Is there life out here? Sprouting up among the rubble? I heard human voices calling back – reports of life, personal and specific. I heard one story at a time – stories of grief and distrust, fury and disappointment. Also gratitude. Discovery. Determination.

Among the most prevalent were the stories of self-revelation. Almost as if machines were given the chance to live as humans, people described blossoming into fuller selves. They listened to their bodies’ cues, recognized their desires and comforts, tuned into their gut instincts, and honored the intuition they hadn’t realized belonged to them. Alex, a writer and fellow disabled parent, found the freedom to explore a fuller version of herself in the privacy the pandemic provided. “The way I dress, the way I love, and the way I carry myself have both shrunk and expanded,” she shared. “I don’t love myself very well with an audience.” Without the daily ritual of trying to pass as “normal” in public, Tamar, a queer mom in the Netherlands, realized she’s autistic. “I think the pandemic helped me to recognize the mask,” she wrote. “Not that unmasking is easy now. But at least I know it’s there.” In a time of widespread suffering that none of us could solve on our own, many tended to our internal wounds and misalignments, large and small, and found clarity.

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I wonder if this flourishing of self-awareness is at least partially responsible for the life alterations people pursued. The pandemic broke open our personal notions of work and pushed us to reevaluate things like time and money. Lucy, a disabled writer in the U.K., made the hard decision to leave her job as a journalist covering Westminster to write freelance about her beloved disability community. “This work feels important in a way nothing else has ever felt,” she wrote. “I don’t think I’d have realized this was what I should be doing without the pandemic.” And she wasn’t alone – many people changed jobs , moved, learned new skills and hobbies, became politically engaged.

Perhaps more than any other shifts, people described a significant reassessment of their relationships. They set boundaries, said no, had challenging conversations. They also reconnected, fell in love, and learned to trust. Jeanne, a quilter in Indiana, got to know relatives she wouldn’t have connected with if lockdowns hadn’t prompted weekly family Zooms. “We are all over the map as regards to our belief systems,” she emphasized, “but it is possible to love people you don’t see eye to eye with on every issue.” Anna, an anti-violence advocate in Maine, learned she could trust her new marriage: “Life was not a honeymoon. But we still chose to turn to each other with kindness and curiosity.” So many bonds forged and broken, strengthened and strained.

Instead of relying on default relationships or institutional structures, widespread recalibrations allowed for going off script and fortifying smaller communities. Mara from Idyllwild, Calif., described the tangible plan for care enacted in her town. “We started a mutual-aid group at the beginning of the pandemic,” she wrote, “and it grew so quickly before we knew it we were feeding 400 of the 4000 residents.” She didn’t pretend the conditions were ideal. In fact, she expressed immense frustration with our collective response to the pandemic. Even so, the local group rallied and continues to offer assistance to their community with help from donations and volunteers (many of whom were originally on the receiving end of support). “I’ve learned that people thrive when they feel their connection to others,” she wrote. Clare, a teacher from the U.K., voiced similar conviction as she described a giant scarf she’s woven out of ribbons, each representing a single person. The scarf is “a collection of stories, moments and wisdom we are sharing with each other,” she wrote. It now stretches well over 1,000 feet.

A few hours into reading the comments, I lay back on my bed, phone held against my chest. The room was quiet, but my internal world was lighting up with firefly flickers. What felt different? Surely part of it was receiving personal accounts of deep-rooted growth. And also, there was something to the mere act of asking and listening. Maybe it connected me to humans before battle cries. Maybe it was the chance to be in conversation with others who were also trying to understand – what is happening to us? Underneath it all, an undeniable thread remained; I saw people peering into the mess and narrating their findings onto the shared frequency. Every comment was like a flare into the sky. I’m here! And if the sky is full of flares, we aren’t alone.

I recognized my own pandemic discoveries – some minor, others massive. Like washing off thick eyeliner and mascara every night is more effort than it’s worth; I can transform the mundane into the magical with a bedsheet, a movie projector, and twinkle lights; my paralyzed body can mother an infant in ways I’d never seen modeled for me. I remembered disappointing, bewildering conversations within my own family of origin and our imperfect attempts to remain close while also seeing things so differently. I realized that every time I get the weekly invite to my virtual “Find the Mumsies” call, with a tiny group of moms living hundreds of miles apart, I’m being welcomed into a pocket of unexpected community. Even though we’ve never been in one room all together, I’ve felt an uncommon kind of solace in their now-familiar faces.

Hope is a slippery thing. I desperately want to hold onto it, but everywhere I look there are real, weighty reasons to despair. The pandemic marks a stretch on the timeline that tangles with a teetering democracy, a deteriorating planet , the loss of human rights that once felt unshakable . When the world is falling apart Land Before Time style, it can feel trite, sniffing out the beauty – useless, firing off flares to anyone looking for signs of life. But, while I’m under no delusions that if we just keep trudging forward we’ll find our own oasis of waterfalls and grassy meadows glistening in the sunshine beneath a heavenly chorus, I wonder if trivializing small acts of beauty, connection, and hope actually cuts us off from resources essential to our survival. The group of abandoned dinosaurs were keeping each other alive and making each other laugh well before they made it to their fantasy ending.

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After the monarch butterfly went on the endangered-species list, my friend and fellow writer Hannah Soyer sent me wildflower seeds to plant in my yard. A simple act of big hope – that I will actually plant them, that they will grow, that a monarch butterfly will receive nourishment from whatever blossoms are able to push their way through the dirt. There are so many ways that could fail. But maybe the outcome wasn’t exactly the point. Maybe hope is the dogged insistence – the stubborn defiance – to continue cultivating moments of beauty regardless. There is value in the planting apart from the harvest.

I can’t point out a single collective lesson from the pandemic. It’s hard to see any great “we.” Still, I see the faces in my moms’ group, making pancakes for their kids and popping on between strings of meetings while we try to figure out how to raise these small people in this chaotic world. I think of my friends on Instagram tending to the selves they discovered when no one was watching and the scarf of ribbons stretching the length of more than three football fields. I remember my family of three, holding hands on the way up the ramp to the library. These bits of growth and rings of support might not be loud or right on the surface, but that’s not the same thing as nothing. If we only cared about the bottom-line defeats or sweeping successes of the big picture, we’d never plant flowers at all.

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Writing about COVID-19 in a college admission essay

by: Venkates Swaminathan | Updated: September 14, 2020

Print article

For students applying to college using the CommonApp, there are several different places where students and counselors can address the pandemic’s impact. The different sections have differing goals. You must understand how to use each section for its appropriate use.

The CommonApp COVID-19 question

First, the CommonApp this year has an additional question specifically about COVID-19 :

Community disruptions such as COVID-19 and natural disasters can have deep and long-lasting impacts. If you need it, this space is yours to describe those impacts. Colleges care about the effects on your health and well-being, safety, family circumstances, future plans, and education, including access to reliable technology and quiet study spaces. Please use this space to describe how these events have impacted you.

This question seeks to understand the adversity that students may have had to face due to the pandemic, the move to online education, or the shelter-in-place rules. You don’t have to answer this question if the impact on you wasn’t particularly severe. Some examples of things students should discuss include:

• The student or a family member had COVID-19 or suffered other illnesses due to confinement during the pandemic.
• The candidate had to deal with personal or family issues, such as abusive living situations or other safety concerns
• The student suffered from a lack of internet access and other online learning challenges.
• Students who dealt with problems registering for or taking standardized tests and AP exams.

Jeff Schiffman of the Tulane University admissions office has a blog about this section. He recommends students ask themselves several questions as they go about answering this section:

• Are my experiences different from others’?
• Are there noticeable changes on my transcript?
• Am I aware of my privilege?
• Am I specific? Am I explaining rather than complaining?
• Is this information being included elsewhere on my application?

If you do answer this section, be brief and to-the-point.

Counselor recommendations and school profiles

Second, counselors will, in their counselor forms and school profiles on the CommonApp, address how the school handled the pandemic and how it might have affected students, specifically as it relates to:

• Grading scales and policies
• Graduation requirements
• Instructional methods
• Schedules and course offerings
• Testing requirements
• Your academic calendar
• Other extenuating circumstances

Students don’t have to mention these matters in their application unless something unusual happened.

Writing about COVID-19 in your main essay

Write about your experiences during the pandemic in your main college essay if your experience is personal, relevant, and the most important thing to discuss in your college admission essay. That you had to stay home and study online isn’t sufficient, as millions of other students faced the same situation. But sometimes, it can be appropriate and helpful to write about something related to the pandemic in your essay. For example:

• One student developed a website for a local comic book store. The store might not have survived without the ability for people to order comic books online. The student had a long-standing relationship with the store, and it was an institution that created a community for students who otherwise felt left out.
• One student started a YouTube channel to help other students with academic subjects he was very familiar with and began tutoring others.
• Some students used their extra time that was the result of the stay-at-home orders to take online courses pursuing topics they are genuinely interested in or developing new interests, like a foreign language or music.

Experiences like this can be good topics for the CommonApp essay as long as they reflect something genuinely important about the student. For many students whose lives have been shaped by this pandemic, it can be a critical part of their college application.

Want more? Read 6 ways to improve a college essay , What the &%$! should I write about in my college essay , and Just how important is a college admissions essay? .

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Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus

Artists, novelists, critics, and essayists are writing the first draft of history.

by Alissa Wilkinson

The world is grappling with an invisible, deadly enemy, trying to understand how to live with the threat posed by a virus . For some writers, the only way forward is to put pen to paper, trying to conceptualize and document what it feels like to continue living as countries are under lockdown and regular life seems to have ground to a halt.

So as the coronavirus pandemic has stretched around the world, it’s sparked a crop of diary entries and essays that describe how life has changed. Novelists, critics, artists, and journalists have put words to the feelings many are experiencing. The result is a first draft of how we’ll someday remember this time, filled with uncertainty and pain and fear as well as small moments of hope and humanity.

• The Vox guide to navigating the coronavirus crisis

At the New York Review of Books, Ali Bhutto writes that in Karachi, Pakistan, the government-imposed curfew due to the virus is “eerily reminiscent of past military clampdowns”:

Beneath the quiet calm lies a sense that society has been unhinged and that the usual rules no longer apply. Small groups of pedestrians look on from the shadows, like an audience watching a spectacle slowly unfolding. People pause on street corners and in the shade of trees, under the watchful gaze of the paramilitary forces and the police.

His essay concludes with the sobering note that “in the minds of many, Covid-19 is just another life-threatening hazard in a city that stumbles from one crisis to another.”

Writing from Chattanooga, novelist Jamie Quatro documents the mixed ways her neighbors have been responding to the threat, and the frustration of conflicting direction, or no direction at all, from local, state, and federal leaders:

Whiplash, trying to keep up with who’s ordering what. We’re already experiencing enough chaos without this back-and-forth. Why didn’t the federal government issue a nationwide shelter-in-place at the get-go, the way other countries did? What happens when one state’s shelter-in-place ends, while others continue? Do states still under quarantine close their borders? We are still one nation, not fifty individual countries. Right?

• A syllabus for the end of the world

Award-winning photojournalist Alessio Mamo, quarantined with his partner Marta in Sicily after she tested positive for the virus, accompanies his photographs in the Guardian of their confinement with a reflection on being confined :

The doctors asked me to take a second test, but again I tested negative. Perhaps I’m immune? The days dragged on in my apartment, in black and white, like my photos. Sometimes we tried to smile, imagining that I was asymptomatic, because I was the virus. Our smiles seemed to bring good news. My mother left hospital, but I won’t be able to see her for weeks. Marta started breathing well again, and so did I. I would have liked to photograph my country in the midst of this emergency, the battles that the doctors wage on the frontline, the hospitals pushed to their limits, Italy on its knees fighting an invisible enemy. That enemy, a day in March, knocked on my door instead.

In the New York Times Magazine, deputy editor Jessica Lustig writes with devastating clarity about her family’s life in Brooklyn while her husband battled the virus, weeks before most people began taking the threat seriously:

At the door of the clinic, we stand looking out at two older women chatting outside the doorway, oblivious. Do I wave them away? Call out that they should get far away, go home, wash their hands, stay inside? Instead we just stand there, awkwardly, until they move on. Only then do we step outside to begin the long three-block walk home. I point out the early magnolia, the forsythia. T says he is cold. The untrimmed hairs on his neck, under his beard, are white. The few people walking past us on the sidewalk don’t know that we are visitors from the future. A vision, a premonition, a walking visitation. This will be them: Either T, in the mask, or — if they’re lucky — me, tending to him.

Essayist Leslie Jamison writes in the New York Review of Books about being shut away alone in her New York City apartment with her 2-year-old daughter since she became sick:

The virus. Its sinewy, intimate name. What does it feel like in my body today? Shivering under blankets. A hot itch behind the eyes. Three sweatshirts in the middle of the day. My daughter trying to pull another blanket over my body with her tiny arms. An ache in the muscles that somehow makes it hard to lie still. This loss of taste has become a kind of sensory quarantine. It’s as if the quarantine keeps inching closer and closer to my insides. First I lost the touch of other bodies; then I lost the air; now I’ve lost the taste of bananas. Nothing about any of these losses is particularly unique. I’ve made a schedule so I won’t go insane with the toddler. Five days ago, I wrote Walk/Adventure! on it, next to a cut-out illustration of a tiger—as if we’d see tigers on our walks. It was good to keep possibility alive.

At Literary Hub, novelist Heidi Pitlor writes about the elastic nature of time during her family’s quarantine in Massachusetts:

During a shutdown, the things that mark our days—commuting to work, sending our kids to school, having a drink with friends—vanish and time takes on a flat, seamless quality. Without some self-imposed structure, it’s easy to feel a little untethered. A friend recently posted on Facebook: “For those who have lost track, today is Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay.” ... Giving shape to time is especially important now, when the future is so shapeless. We do not know whether the virus will continue to rage for weeks or months or, lord help us, on and off for years. We do not know when we will feel safe again. And so many of us, minus those who are gifted at compartmentalization or denial, remain largely captive to fear. We may stay this way if we do not create at least the illusion of movement in our lives, our long days spent with ourselves or partners or families.

• What day is it today?

Novelist Lauren Groff writes at the New York Review of Books about trying to escape the prison of her fears while sequestered at home in Gainesville, Florida:

Some people have imaginations sparked only by what they can see; I blame this blinkered empiricism for the parks overwhelmed with people, the bars, until a few nights ago, thickly thronged. My imagination is the opposite. I fear everything invisible to me. From the enclosure of my house, I am afraid of the suffering that isn’t present before me, the people running out of money and food or drowning in the fluid in their lungs, the deaths of health-care workers now growing ill while performing their duties. I fear the federal government, which the right wing has so—intentionally—weakened that not only is it insufficient to help its people, it is actively standing in help’s way. I fear we won’t sufficiently punish the right. I fear leaving the house and spreading the disease. I fear what this time of fear is doing to my children, their imaginations, and their souls.

At ArtForum , Berlin-based critic and writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen reflects on martinis, melancholia, and Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo’s 2018 graphic novel Retreat , in which three young people exile themselves in the woods:

In melancholia, the shape of what is ending, and its temporality, is sprawling and incomprehensible. The ambivalence makes it hard to bear. The world of Retreat is rendered in lush pink and purple watercolors, which dissolve into wild and messy abstractions. In apocalypse, the divisions established in genesis bleed back out. My own Corona-retreat is similarly soft, color-field like, each day a blurred succession of quarantinis, YouTube–yoga, and televized press conferences. As restrictions mount, so does abstraction. For now, I’m still rooting for love to save the world.

At the Paris Review , Matt Levin writes about reading Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves during quarantine:

A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness—they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand. It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine—a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day’s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway—it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption.

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In an essay for the Financial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy writes with anger about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anemic response to the threat, but also offers a glimmer of hope for the future:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

From Boston, Nora Caplan-Bricker writes in The Point about the strange contraction of space under quarantine, in which a friend in Beirut is as close as the one around the corner in the same city:

It’s a nice illusion—nice to feel like we’re in it together, even if my real world has shrunk to one person, my husband, who sits with his laptop in the other room. It’s nice in the same way as reading those essays that reframe social distancing as solidarity. “We must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don’t do is also brilliant and full of love,” the poet Anne Boyer wrote on March 10th, the day that Massachusetts declared a state of emergency. If you squint, you could almost make sense of this quarantine as an effort to flatten, along with the curve, the distinctions we make between our bonds with others. Right now, I care for my neighbor in the same way I demonstrate love for my mother: in all instances, I stay away. And in moments this month, I have loved strangers with an intensity that is new to me. On March 14th, the Saturday night after the end of life as we knew it, I went out with my dog and found the street silent: no lines for restaurants, no children on bicycles, no couples strolling with little cups of ice cream. It had taken the combined will of thousands of people to deliver such a sudden and complete emptiness. I felt so grateful, and so bereft.

And on his own website, musician and artist David Byrne writes about rediscovering the value of working for collective good , saying that “what is happening now is an opportunity to learn how to change our behavior”:

In emergencies, citizens can suddenly cooperate and collaborate. Change can happen. We’re going to need to work together as the effects of climate change ramp up. In order for capitalism to survive in any form, we will have to be a little more socialist. Here is an opportunity for us to see things differently — to see that we really are all connected — and adjust our behavior accordingly. Are we willing to do this? Is this moment an opportunity to see how truly interdependent we all are? To live in a world that is different and better than the one we live in now? We might be too far down the road to test every asymptomatic person, but a change in our mindsets, in how we view our neighbors, could lay the groundwork for the collective action we’ll need to deal with other global crises. The time to see how connected we all are is now.

The portrait these writers paint of a world under quarantine is multifaceted. Our worlds have contracted to the confines of our homes, and yet in some ways we’re more connected than ever to one another. We feel fear and boredom, anger and gratitude, frustration and strange peace. Uncertainty drives us to find metaphors and images that will let us wrap our minds around what is happening.

Yet there’s no single “what” that is happening. Everyone is contending with the pandemic and its effects from different places and in different ways. Reading others’ experiences — even the most frightening ones — can help alleviate the loneliness and dread, a little, and remind us that what we’re going through is both unique and shared by all.

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Coronavirus: The world has come together to flatten the curve. Can we stay united to tackle other crises?

Watching the world come together gives me hope for the future, writes mira patel, a high school junior..

Mira Patel and her sister Veda. (Courtesy of Dee Patel)

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Before the pandemic, I had often heard adults say that young people would lose the ability to connect in-person with others due to our growing dependence on technology and social media. However, this stay-at-home experience has proven to me that our elders’ worry is unnecessary. Because isolation isn’t in human nature, and no advancement in technology could replace our need to meet in person, especially when it comes to learning.

As the weather gets warmer and we approach summertime, it’s going to be more and more tempting for us teenagers to go out and do what we have always done: hang out and have fun. Even though the decision-makers are adults, everyone has a role to play and we teens can help the world move forward by continuing to self-isolate. It’s incredibly important that in the coming weeks, we respect the government’s effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

In the meantime, we can find creative ways to stay connected and continue to do what we love. Personally, I see many 6-feet-apart bike rides and Zoom calls in my future.

If there is anything that this pandemic has made me realize, it’s how connected we all are. At first, the infamous coronavirus seemed to be a problem in China, which is worlds away. But slowly, it steadily made its way through various countries in Europe, and inevitably reached us in America. What was once framed as a foreign virus has now hit home.

Watching the global community come together, gives me hope, as a teenager, that in the future we can use this cooperation to combat climate change and other catastrophes.

As COVID-19 continues to creep its way into each of our communities and impact the way we live and communicate, I find solace in the fact that we face what comes next together, as humanity.

When the day comes that my generation is responsible for dealing with another crisis, I hope we can use this experience to remind us that moving forward requires a joint effort.

Mira Patel is a junior at Strath Haven High School and is an education intern at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Follow her on Instagram here.  

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One Student's Perspective on Life During a Pandemic

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The pandemic and resulting shelter-in-place restrictions are affecting everyone in different ways. Tiana Nguyen, shares both the pros and cons of her experience as a student at Santa Clara University.

person sitting at table with open laptop, notebook and pen

Tiana Nguyen ‘21 is a Hackworth Fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. She is majoring in Computer Science, and is the vice president of Santa Clara University’s Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) chapter .

The world has slowed down, but stress has begun to ramp up.

In the beginning of quarantine, as the world slowed down, I could finally take some time to relax, watch some shows, learn to be a better cook and baker, and be more active in my extracurriculars. I have a lot of things to be thankful for. I especially appreciate that I’m able to live in a comfortable house and have gotten the opportunity to spend more time with my family. This has actually been the first time in years in which we’re all able to even eat meals together every single day. Even when my brother and I were young, my parents would be at work and sometimes come home late, so we didn’t always eat meals together. In the beginning of the quarantine I remember my family talking about how nice it was to finally have meals together, and my brother joking, “it only took a pandemic to bring us all together,” which I laughed about at the time (but it’s the truth).

Soon enough, we’ll all be back to going to different places and we’ll be separated once again. So I’m thankful for my living situation right now. As for my friends, even though we’re apart, I do still feel like I can be in touch with them through video chat—maybe sometimes even more in touch than before. I think a lot of people just have a little more time for others right now.

Although there are still a lot of things to be thankful for, stress has slowly taken over, and work has been overwhelming. I’ve always been a person who usually enjoys going to classes, taking on more work than I have to, and being active in general. But lately I’ve felt swamped with the amount of work given, to the point that my days have blurred into online assignments, Zoom classes, and countless meetings, with a touch of baking sweets and aimless searching on Youtube.

The pass/no pass option for classes continues to stare at me, but I look past it every time to use this quarter as an opportunity to boost my grades. I've tried to make sense of this type of overwhelming feeling that I’ve never really felt before. Is it because I’m working harder and putting in more effort into my schoolwork with all the spare time I now have? Is it because I’m not having as much interaction with other people as I do at school? Or is it because my classes this quarter are just supposed to be this much harder? I honestly don’t know; it might not even be any of those. What I do know though, is that I have to continue work and push through this feeling.

This quarter I have two synchronous and two asynchronous classes, which each have pros and cons. Originally, I thought I wanted all my classes to be synchronous, since that everyday interaction with my professor and classmates is valuable to me. However, as I experienced these asynchronous classes, I’ve realized that it can be nice to watch a lecture on my own time because it even allows me to pause the video to give me extra time for taking notes. This has made me pay more attention during lectures and take note of small details that I might have missed otherwise. Furthermore, I do realize that synchronous classes can also be a burden for those abroad who have to wake up in the middle of the night just to attend a class. I feel that it’s especially unfortunate when professors want students to attend but don’t make attendance mandatory for this reason; I find that most abroad students attend anyway, driven by the worry they’ll be missing out on something.

I do still find synchronous classes amazing though, especially for discussion-based courses. I feel in touch with other students from my classes whom I wouldn’t otherwise talk to or regularly reach out to. Since Santa Clara University is a small school, it is especially easy to interact with one another during classes on Zoom, and I even sometimes find it less intimidating to participate during class through Zoom than in person. I’m honestly not the type to participate in class, but this quarter I found myself participating in some classes more than usual. The breakout rooms also create more interaction, since we’re assigned to random classmates, instead of whomever we’re sitting closest to in an in-person class—though I admit breakout rooms can sometimes be awkward.

Something that I find beneficial in both synchronous and asynchronous classes is that professors post a lecture recording that I can always refer to whenever I want. I found this especially helpful when I studied for my midterms this quarter; it’s nice to have a recording to look back upon in case I missed something during a lecture.

Overall, life during these times is substantially different from anything most of us have ever experienced, and at times it can be extremely overwhelming and stressful—especially in terms of school for me. Online classes don’t provide the same environment and interactions as in-person classes and are by far not as enjoyable. But at the end of the day, I know that in every circumstance there is always something to be thankful for, and I’m appreciative for my situation right now. While the world has slowed down and my stress has ramped up, I’m slowly beginning to adjust to it.

Students’ Essays on Infectious Disease Prevention, COVID-19 Published Nationwide

As part of the BIO 173: Global Change and Infectious Disease course, Professor Fred Cohan assigns students to write an essay persuading others to prevent future and mitigate present infectious diseases. If students submit their essay to a news outlet—and it’s published—Cohan awards them with extra credit.

As a result of this assignment, more than 25 students have had their work published in newspapers across the United States. Many of these essays cite and applaud the University’s Keep Wes Safe campaign and its COVID-19 testing protocols.

Cohan, professor of biology and Huffington Foundation Professor in the College of the Environment (COE), began teaching the Global Change and Infectious Disease course in 2009, when the COE was established. “I wanted very much to contribute a course to what I saw as a real game-changer in Wesleyan’s interest in the environment. The course is about all the ways that human demands on the environment have brought us infectious diseases, over past millennia and in the present, and why our environmental disturbances will continue to bring us infections into the future.”

Over the years, Cohan learned that he can sustainably teach about 170 students every year without running out of interested students. This fall, he had 207. Although he didn’t change the overall structure of his course to accommodate COVID-19 topics, he did add material on the current pandemic to various sections of the course.

“I wouldn’t say that the population of the class increased tremendously as a result of COVID-19, but I think the enthusiasm of the students for the material has increased substantially,” he said.

To accommodate online learning, Cohan shaved off 15 minutes from his normal 80-minute lectures to allow for discussion sections, led by Cohan and teaching assistants. “While the lectures mostly dealt with biology, the discussions focused on how changes in behavior and policy can solve the infectious disease problems brought by human disturbance of the environment,” he said.

Based on student responses to an introspective exam question, Cohan learned that many students enjoyed a new hope that we could each contribute to fighting infectious disease. “They discovered that the solution to infectious disease is not entirely a waiting game for the right technologies to come along,” he said. “Many enjoyed learning about fighting infectious disease from a moral and social perspective. And especially, the students enjoyed learning about the ‘socialism of the microbe,’ how preventing and curing others’ infections will prevent others’ infections from becoming our own. The students enjoyed seeing how this idea can drive both domestic and international health policies.”

A sampling of the published student essays are below:

Alexander Giummo ’22 and Mike Dunderdale’s ’23  op-ed titled “ A National Testing Proposal: Let’s Fight Back Against COVID-19 ” was published in the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.

They wrote: “With an expansive and increased testing plan for U.S. citizens, those who are COVID-positive could limit the number of contacts they have, and this would also help to enable more effective contact tracing. Testing could also allow for the return of some ‘normal’ events, such as small social gatherings, sports, and in-person class and work schedules.

“We propose a national testing strategy in line with the one that has kept Wesleyan students safe this year. The plan would require a strong push by the federal government to fund the initiative, but it is vital to successful containment of the virus.

“Twice a week, all people living in the U.S. should report to a local testing site staffed with professionals where the anterior nasal swab Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test, used by Wesleyan and supported by the Broad Institute, would be implemented.”

Kalyani Mohan ’22 and Kalli Jackson ’22 penned an essay titled “ Where Public Health Meets Politics: COVID-19 in the United States ,” which was published in Wesleyan’s Arcadia Political Review .

They wrote: “While the U.S. would certainly benefit from a strengthened pandemic response team and structural changes to public health systems, that alone isn’t enough, as American society is immensely stratified, socially and culturally. The politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic shows that individualism, libertarianism and capitalism are deeply ingrained in American culture, to the extent that Americans often blind to the fact community welfare can be equivalent to personal welfare. Pandemics are multifaceted, and preventing them requires not just a cultural shift but an emotional one amongst the American people, one guided by empathy—towards other people, different communities and the planet. Politics should be a tool, not a weapon against its people.”

Sydnee Goyer ’21 and Marcel Thompson’s ’22  essay “ This Flu Season Will Be Decisive in the Fight Against COVID-19 ” also was published in Arcadia Political Review .

“With winter approaching all around the Northern Hemisphere, people are preparing for what has already been named a “twindemic,” meaning the joint threat of the coronavirus and the seasonal flu,” they wrote. “While it is known that seasonal vaccinations reduce the risk of getting the flu by up to 60% and also reduce the severity of the illness after the contamination, additional research has been conducted in order to know whether or not flu shots could reduce the risk of people getting COVID-19. In addition to the flu shot, it is essential that people remain vigilant in maintaining proper social distancing, washing your hands thoroughly, and continuing to wear masks in public spaces.”

An op-ed titled “ The Pandemic Has Shown Us How Workplace Culture Needs to Change ,” written by Adam Hickey ’22 and George Fuss ’21, was published in Park City, Utah’s The Park Record .

They wrote: “One review of academic surveys (most of which were conducted in the United States) conducted in 2019 found that between 35% and 97% of respondents in those surveys reported having attended work while they were ill, often because of workplace culture or policy which generated pressure to do so. Choosing to ignore sickness and return to the workplace while one is ill puts colleagues at risk, regardless of the perceived severity of your own illness; COVID-19 is an overbearing reminder that a disease that may cause mild, even cold-like symptoms for some can still carry fatal consequences for others.

“A mandatory paid sick leave policy for every worker, ideally across the globe, would allow essential workers to return to work when necessary while still providing enough wiggle room for economically impoverished employees to take time off without going broke if they believe they’ve contracted an illness so as not to infect the rest of their workplace and the public at large.”

Women’s cross country team members and classmates Jane Hollander ’23 and Sara Greene ’23 wrote a sports-themed essay titled “ This Season, High School Winter Sports Aren’t Worth the Risk ,” which was published in Tap into Scotch Plains/Fanwood , based in Scotch Plains, N.J. Their essay focused on the risks high school sports pose on student-athletes, their families, and the greater community.

“We don’t propose cutting off sports entirely— rather, we need to be realistic about the levels at which athletes should be participating. There are ways to make practices safer,” they wrote. “At [Wesleyan], we began the season in ‘cohorts,’ so the amount of people exposed to one another would be smaller. For non-contact sports, social distancing can be easily implemented, and for others, teams can focus on drills, strength and conditioning workouts, and skill-building exercises. Racing sports such as swim and track can compete virtually, comparing times with other schools, and team sports can focus their competition on intra-team scrimmages. These changes can allow for the continuation of a sense of normalcy and team camaraderie without the exposure to students from different geographic areas in confined, indoor spaces.”

Brook Guiffre ’23 and Maddie Clarke’s ’22  op-ed titled “ On the Pandemic ” was published in Hometown Weekly,  based in Medfield, Mass.

“The first case of COVID-19 in the United States was recorded on January 20th, 2020. For the next month and a half, the U.S. continued operating normally, while many other countries began their lockdown,” they wrote. “One month later, on February 29th, 2020, the federal government approved a national testing program, but it was too little too late. The U.S. was already in pandemic mode, and completely unprepared. Frontline workers lacked access to N-95 masks, infected patients struggled to get tested, and national leaders informed the public that COVID-19 was nothing more than the common flu. Ultimately, this unpreparedness led to thousands of avoidable deaths and long-term changes to daily life. With the risk of novel infectious diseases emerging in the future being high, it is imperative that the U.S. learn from its failure and better prepare for future pandemics now. By strengthening our public health response and re-establishing government organizations specialized in disease control, we have the ability to prevent more years spent masked and six feet apart.”

In addition, their other essay, “ On Mass Extinction ,” was also published by Hometown Weekly .

“The sixth mass extinction—which scientists have coined as the Holocene Extinction—is upon us. According to the United Nations, around one million plant and animal species are currently in danger of extinction, and many more within the next decade. While other extinctions have occurred in Earth’s history, none have occurred at such a rapid rate,” they wrote. “For the sake of both biodiversity and infectious diseases, it is in our best interest to stop pushing this Holocene Extinction further.”

An essay titled “ Learning from Our Mistakes: How to Protect Ourselves and Our Communities from Diseases ,” written by Nicole Veru ’21 and Zoe Darmon ’21, was published in My Hometown Bronxville, based in Bronxville, N.Y.

“We can protect ourselves and others from future infectious diseases by ensuring that we are vaccinated,” they wrote. “Vaccines have high levels of success if enough people get them. Due to vaccines, society is no longer ravaged by childhood diseases such as mumps, rubella, measles, and smallpox. We have been able to eradicate diseases through vaccines; smallpox, one of the world’s most consequential diseases, was eradicated from the world in the 1970s.

“In 2000, the U.S. was nearly free of measles, yet, due to hesitations by anti-vaxxers, there continues to be cases. From 2000–2015 there were over 18 measles outbreaks in the U.S. This is because unless a disease is completely eradicated, there will be a new generation susceptible.

“Although vaccines are not 100% effective at preventing infection, if we continue to get vaccinated, we protect ourselves and those around us. If enough people are vaccinated, societies can develop herd immunity. The amount of people vaccinated to obtain herd immunity depends on the disease, but if this fraction is obtained, the spread of disease is contained. Through herd immunity, we protect those who may not be able to get vaccinated, such as people who are immunocompromised and the tiny portion of people for whom the vaccine is not effective.”

Dhruvi Rana ’22 and Bryce Gillis ’22 co-authored an op-ed titled “ We Must Educate Those Who Remain Skeptical of the Dangers of COVID-19 ,” which was published in Rhode Island Central .

“As Rhode Island enters the winter season, temperatures are beginning to drop and many studies have demonstrated that colder weather and lower humidity are correlated with higher transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19,” they wrote. “By simply talking or breathing, we release respiratory droplets and aerosols (tiny fluid particles which could carry the coronavirus pathogen), which can remain in the air for minutes to hours.

“In order to establish herd immunity in the US, we must educate those who remain skeptical of the dangers of COVID-19.  Whether community-driven or state-funded, educational campaigns are needed to ensure that everyone fully comprehends how severe COVID-19 is and the significance of airborne transmission. While we await a vaccine, it is necessary now more than ever that we social distance, avoid crowds, and wear masks, given that colder temperatures will likely yield increased transmission of the virus.”

Danielle Rinaldi ’21 and Verónica Matos Socorro ’21 published their op-ed titled “ Community Forum: How Mask-Wearing Demands a Cultural Reset ” in the Ewing Observer , based in Lawrence, N.J.

“In their own attempt to change personal behavior during the pandemic, Wesleyan University has mandated mask-wearing in almost every facet of campus life,” they wrote. “As members of our community, we must recognize that mask-wearing is something we are all responsible and accountable for, not only because it is a form of protection for us, but just as important for others as well. However, it seems as though both Covid fatigue and complacency are dominating the mindsets of Americans, leading to even more unwillingness to mask up. Ultimately, it is inevitable that this pandemic will not be the last in our lifespan due to global warming creating irreversible losses in biodiversity. As a result, it is imperative that we adopt the norm of mask-wearing now and undergo a culture shift of the abandonment of an individualistic mindset, and instead, create a society that prioritizes taking care of others for the benefit of all.”

Shayna Dollinger ’22 and Hayley Lipson ’21  wrote an essay titled “ My Pandemic Year in College Has Brought Pride and Purpose. ” Dollinger submitted the piece, rewritten in first person, to Jewish News of Northern California . Read more about Dollinger’s publication in this News @ Wesleyan article .

“I lay in the dead grass, a 6-by-6-foot square all to myself. I cheer for my best friend, who is on the stage constructed at the bottom of Foss hill, dancing with her Bollywood dance group. Masks cover their ordinarily smiling faces as their bodies move in sync. Looking around at friends and classmates, each in their own 6-by-6 world, I feel an overwhelming sense of normalcy.

“One of the ways in which Wesleyan has prevented outbreaks on campus is by holding safe, socially distanced events that students want to attend. By giving us places to be and things to do on the weekends, we are discouraged from breaking rules and causing outbreaks at ‘super-spreader’ events.”

An op-ed written by Luna Mac-Williams ’22 and Daëlle Coriolan ’24 titled “ Collectivist Practices to Combat COVID-19 ” was published in the Wesleyan Argus .

“We are embroiled in a global pandemic that disproportionately affects poor communities of color, and in the midst of a higher cultural consciousness of systemic inequities,” they wrote. “A cultural shift to center collectivist thought and action not only would prove helpful in disease prevention, but also belongs in conversation with the Black Lives Matter movement. Collectivist models of thinking effectively target the needs of vulnerable populations including the sick, the disenfranchised, the systematically marginalized. Collectivist systems provide care, decentering the capitalist, individualist system, and focusing on how communities can work to be self-sufficient and uplift our own neighbors.”

An essay written by Maria Noto ’21 , titled “ U.S. Individualism Has Deadly Consequences ,” is published in the Oneonta Daily Star , based in Oneonta, N.Y.

She wrote, “When analyzing the cultures of certain East Asian countries, several differences stand out. For instance, when people are sick and during the cold and flu season, many East Asian cultures, including South Korea, use mask-wearing. What is considered a threat to freedom by some Americans is a preventive action and community obligation in this example. This, along with many other cultural differences, is insightful in understanding their ability to contain the virus.

“These differences are deeply seeded in the values of a culture. However, there is hope for the U.S. and other individualistic cultures in recognizing and adopting these community-centered approaches. Our mindset needs to be revolutionized with the help of federal and local assistance: mandating masks, passing another stimulus package, contact tracing, etc… However, these measures will be unsuccessful unless everyone participates for the good of a community.”

A published op-ed by Madison Szabo ’23 , Caitlyn Ferrante ’23 ran in the Two Rivers Times . The piece is titled “ Anxiety and Aspiration: Analyzing the Politicization of the Pandemic .”

John Lee ’21 and Taylor Goodman-Leong ’21 have published their op-ed titled “ Reassessing the media’s approach to COVID-19 ” in Weekly Monday Cafe 24 (Page 2).

An essay by Eleanor Raab ’21 and Elizabeth Nefferdorf ’22 titled “ Preventing the Next Epidemic ” was published in The Almanac .

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Keeping ethics alive during the pandemic

Harvard Correspondent

Center for Ethics launches COVID-19 Rapid Response Impact Initiative

This is part of our Coronavirus Update series in which Harvard specialists in epidemiology, infectious disease, economics, politics, and other disciplines offer insights into what the latest developments in the COVID-19 outbreak may bring.

With life-and-death issues of health and medicine foremost in our minds, ethics can get short shrift. To bring them to the public eye, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics has issued the COVID-19 Rapid Response Impact Initiative, a series of white papers from some 40 thinkers on issues of justice, values, and civil liberties designed to inform policymakers during the crisis.

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“Integrated policymaking recognizes that really hard problems typically need to combine multiple kinds of expertise,” said Center for Ethics Director Danielle Allen. “The challenge is how to integrate different kinds of expertise.”

While peer-reviewed publications can quickly publish and share work by the medical and scientific communities, too often ethics and the social sciences get only scattered articles or newspaper op-ed columns. This series, Allen said, responds to that challenge. “We need to keep ethics and values at the center of the conversation.”

Launched last month with “ Securing Justice, Health and Democracy against COVID-19 ,” the series addresses pandemic-specific issues such as balancing the necessity of social distancing against the right of assembly and the moral imperative of widespread diagnostic testing. The center is scheduled to release an integrated policy road map for a national response to COVID-19 next week.

“You have to make sure that with any tactics that you pursue to secure public health, you also look at the impact on our liberties,” said Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor and lead author on that first white paper. That paper — co-authored with Assistant Professor of Philosophy Lucas Stanczyk; James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law I. Glenn Cohen; Executive Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics Carmel Shachar; Columbia University Professor of Economics Rajiv Sethi; Microsoft economist Glen Weyl; and Georgetown Law Professor Rosa Brooks — says: “The goal is not to defeat the adversary at any cost but to preserve one’s society.”

Although the papers’ focus is COVID-19, many of the topics are similar to those that arose during previous crises, such as the issues surrounding testing and contact tracing during the HIV/AIDS crisis.

“These were problematic in the early days of the battle,” said Allen. “But the approaches evolved over time precisely because of civil liberties concerns. So now, for example, New York has a great testing and contact-tracing program for HIV, which is driven by community organizations. In other words, [it ensures] that the point of testing and tracing is people’s health and well-being and warning the community about potential dangers, not surveillance.”

Other papers deal with problems specific to this pandemic. Melani Cammett and Evan Lieberman’s paper, “Building Solidarity: Challenges, Options, and Implications for COVID-19 Responses,” examines the nature of social cohesion, looking at the ways in which cooperation can be fostered by social and governmental organizations even as we keep apart.

“Everybody needs to be together in this, to comply with some of the very stringent practices that we are all being asked to abide by at this moment” said Cammett, Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs in the Department of Government and chair of the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies. “This can become particularly challenging because we are a very fractionalized society.

“Social behavior is not entirely driven from the top down, but it is well known that the top down does play an important role in driving pro-social behavior,” she said. “We’re speaking to public officials and community and religious leaders who, in many places, are playing an incredibly constructive role in both maintaining a sense of community among their congregants and also promoting the proper behaviors to comply with public health directives.”

David Campbell, Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at Notre Dame University, writes about activating volunteerism in an era when people cannot physically meet. “If there is one thing Americans are known for, it’s their high level of volunteerism,” he said. “As we weather the COVID storm, it will be critical to activate these volunteer networks.” He cited the innovative ways groups are using social media to support and organize volunteerism, such as movements by people stuck in their homes to sew face masks for local clinics and pharmacies. “With that sort of effort multiplied throughout the country, one can begin to appreciate the untapped potential of America’s volunteer army,” he said.

The Center for Ethics will host  a public panel Thursday at 5 p.m. on Zoom , featuring Paul Farmer, M.D./Ph.D. ’90, the Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University; Govind Persad, assistant professor, Sturm College of Law, University of Denver; Allison Stanger, a professor at Middlebury College and Human Values Senior Fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics; and Allen discussing COVID-19 and the work coming out of the white paper series. A second public talk will follow on April 23, with Laurence Ralph , John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, focused on policing and COVID-19.

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Covid 19 Essay in English

Essay on Covid -19: In a very short amount of time, coronavirus has spread globally. It has had an enormous impact on people's lives, economy, and societies all around the world, affecting every country. Governments have had to take severe measures to try and contain the pandemic. The virus has altered our way of life in many ways, including its effects on our health and our economy. Here are a few sample essays on ‘CoronaVirus’.

100 Words Essay on Covid 19

200 words essay on covid 19, 500 words essay on covid 19.

COVID-19 or Corona Virus is a novel coronavirus that was first identified in 2019. It is similar to other coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, but it is more contagious and has caused more severe respiratory illness in people who have been infected. The novel coronavirus became a global pandemic in a very short period of time. It has affected lives, economies and societies across the world, leaving no country untouched. The virus has caused governments to take drastic measures to try and contain it. From health implications to economic and social ramifications, COVID-19 impacted every part of our lives. It has been more than 2 years since the pandemic hit and the world is still recovering from its effects.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the world has been impacted in a number of ways. For one, the global economy has taken a hit as businesses have been forced to close their doors. This has led to widespread job losses and an increase in poverty levels around the world. Additionally, countries have had to impose strict travel restrictions in an attempt to contain the virus, which has resulted in a decrease in tourism and international trade. Furthermore, the pandemic has put immense pressure on healthcare systems globally, as hospitals have been overwhelmed with patients suffering from the virus. Lastly, the outbreak has led to a general feeling of anxiety and uncertainty, as people are fearful of contracting the disease.

My Experience of COVID-19

I still remember how abruptly colleges and schools shut down in March 2020. I was a college student at that time and I was under the impression that everything would go back to normal in a few weeks. I could not have been more wrong. The situation only got worse every week and the government had to impose a lockdown. There were so many restrictions in place. For example, we had to wear face masks whenever we left the house, and we could only go out for essential errands. Restaurants and shops were only allowed to operate at take-out capacity, and many businesses were shut down.

In the current scenario, coronavirus is dominating all aspects of our lives. The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc upon people’s lives, altering the way we live and work in a very short amount of time. It has revolutionised how we think about health care, education, and even social interaction. This virus has had long-term implications on our society, including its impact on mental health, economic stability, and global politics. But we as individuals can help to mitigate these effects by taking personal responsibility to protect themselves and those around them from infection.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Education

The outbreak of coronavirus has had a significant impact on education systems around the world. In China, where the virus originated, all schools and universities were closed for several weeks in an effort to contain the spread of the disease. Many other countries have followed suit, either closing schools altogether or suspending classes for a period of time.

This has resulted in a major disruption to the education of millions of students. Some have been able to continue their studies online, but many have not had access to the internet or have not been able to afford the costs associated with it. This has led to a widening of the digital divide between those who can afford to continue their education online and those who cannot.

The closure of schools has also had a negative impact on the mental health of many students. With no face-to-face contact with friends and teachers, some students have felt isolated and anxious. This has been compounded by the worry and uncertainty surrounding the virus itself.

The situation with coronavirus has improved and schools have been reopened but students are still catching up with the gap of 2 years that the pandemic created. In the meantime, governments and educational institutions are working together to find ways to support students and ensure that they are able to continue their education despite these difficult circumstances.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Economy

The outbreak of the coronavirus has had a significant impact on the global economy. The virus, which originated in China, has spread to over two hundred countries, resulting in widespread panic and a decrease in global trade. As a result of the outbreak, many businesses have been forced to close their doors, leading to a rise in unemployment. In addition, the stock market has taken a severe hit.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Health

The effects that coronavirus has on one's health are still being studied and researched as the virus continues to spread throughout the world. However, some of the potential effects on health that have been observed thus far include respiratory problems, fever, and coughing. In severe cases, pneumonia, kidney failure, and death can occur. It is important for people who think they may have been exposed to the virus to seek medical attention immediately so that they can be treated properly and avoid any serious complications. There is no specific cure or treatment for coronavirus at this time, but there are ways to help ease symptoms and prevent the virus from spreading.

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Citizenship in the time of pandemic

CAMP Aguinaldo—For the past three months, contemporary life as we know it has been turned upside down. Segments of our society were pushed to the edge in an unprecedented crisis that has exposed the deep crevasses in our society, particularly in our government institutions.

The spread of COVID-19 is a vicious test of the resilience of our government institutions, the capacity of the people in power to run this fragile system, and the capability of the Filipino people to make them accountable.

With local governments at the epicenter of government response, people saw how local executives performed (or underperformed) in response to the spread of the virus. Many are now convinced more than ever that able executives are crucial in responding to situations of great emergency.

In Metro Manila and other urban centers, these able executives utilized the autonomy granted them by the Local Government Code to make sure their constituents were safe not just from COVID-19, but more so from the ill effects of the mandatory quarantine. Unfortunately, not all local governments have these able executives.

On the other hand, the need for investments in mechanisms of public health that can easily be activated in situations of public health emergency has been highlighted. Efficient testing and contact tracing are two crucial elements in arresting the spread of a highly contagious pathogen, and it seems the health department can do so much better in this regard.

On a positive note, we have seen the primary asset of our society—a vibrant civil society—in action. Despite being locked up, the exercise of civil liberties was on display as citizens took to social media and observed every step the government took in trying to arrest the spread of COVID-19.

Moreover, we saw how sectors of civil society stepped up to help the government and those who were in need: big businesses mobilized their resources to provide assistance, religious organizations did what they could to help affected communities, a team of fashion designers designed reusable personal protective equipment for frontliners, and random Facebook groups popped up to help vulnerable groups such as jeepney drivers who had lost their source of livelihood due to the quarantine.

These initiatives, among many others, were a testament to the strength of our civil society.

The Asian Development Bank, in a policy brief published in 2013, named the Philippines’ civil society as “some of the most vibrant and advanced in the world… The basis for civil society comes from the Filipino concepts of pakikipagkapwa (holistic interaction with others) and kapwa (shared inner self). Voluntary assistance or charity connotes for Filipinos an equal status between the provider of assistance and the recipient, which is embodied in the terms damayan (assistance of peers in periods of crisis) and pagtutulungan (mutual self-help).”

Nevertheless, civil society and/or private sector cannot work on the pandemic fight alone. They need the government to be at the helm of effective decision-making to make sure that no efforts go to waste in fighting this invisible enemy.

Experts say this new normal could last up to two years until a vaccine is found. One thing that offers hope in this situation is the suggestion by one study that people’s tolerance for reckless government decision-making declines after a society emerges out of a pandemic.

Here’s hoping that Filipinos will remember the time when the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on their lives, as they cast their ballots in May 2022.

P2Lt. Jesse Angelo L. Altez is a member of the Corps of Professors, Armed Forces of the Philippines. He is a recipient of the Asian Development Bank-Japan Scholarship and obtained a master’s degree in public policy from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo. The views expressed here are entirely his own and do not represent the position of the AFP.

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• Open access
• Published: 09 March 2022

Social responsibility perspective in public response to the COVID-19 pandemic: a grounded theory approach

• Lee Lan Low 1 ,
• Seng Fah Tong 2 ,
• Ju Ying Ang 3 ,
• Zalilah Abdullah 1 ,
• Maimunah A Hamid 4 ,
• Mikha Saragi Risman 1 ,
• Yun Teng Wong 1 ,
• Nurul Iman Jamalul-lail 1 ,
• Kalvina Chelladorai 1 ,
• Yui Ping Tan 1 ,
• Yea Lu Tay 1 ,
• Awatef Amer Nordin 1 &
• Amar-Singh HSS 5  

BMC Public Health volume  22 , Article number:  469 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Combating viral outbreaks extends beyond biomedical and clinical approaches; thus, public health prevention measures are equally important. Public engagement in preventive efforts can be viewed as the social responsibility of individuals in controlling an infectious disease and are subjected to change due to human behaviour. Understanding individuals’ perception of social responsibility is crucial and is not yet explored extensively in the academic literature. We adopted the grounded theory method to develop an explanatory substantive theory to illustrate the process of how individual responded to the outbreak from a social responsibility perspective.

In-depth interviews were conducted among 23 Malaysians either through telephone or face-to-face depending on the participant’s preference. Both purposive and theoretical sampling were used. Participants were invited to share their understanding, perceptions and activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. They were further probed about their perceptions on complying with the public health interventions imposed by the authorities. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data was analysed via open coding, focus coding and theoretical coding, facilitated by memoing, sketching and modelling.

Study findings showed that, social responsibility is perceived within its role, the perceived societal role responsibility. In a particular context, an individual assumed only one of the many expected social roles with their perceived circle of responsibility. Individuals negotiated their actions from this perspective, after considering the perceived risk during the outbreak. The four types of behaviour depicted in the matrix diagram facilitate the understanding of the abstract concept of negotiation in the human decision-making process, and provide the spectrum of different behaviour in relation to public response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conclusions

Our study adopted the grounded theory approach to develop a theoretical model that illustrates how individual response to COVID-19 preventive measures is determined by the negotiation between perceived societal role responsibility and perceived infection risk. This substantive theoretical model is abstract, thus has relevance for adoption within similar context of an outbreak.

Peer Review reports

COVID-19 caught the world’s attention when it was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) [ 1 ]. With its rapid spread within and between countries, COVID-19 was classified as a public health emergency of international concern that required a systematic international response [ 2 ]. COVID-19 is caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which is a novel coronavirus similar to SARS-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-Cov) that infect the respiratory tract and cause severe respiratory infections. In December 2019, the disease was first reported in Wuhan City, China, in a wholesale food market and infected different groups of people such as stall owners, market employees and regular visitors [ 3 ]. Previously, Malaysia experienced a Nipah virus outbreak from September 1998 to May 1999 which resulted in 265 human cases affected and substantial economic loss to the pig-farming industry [ 4 , 5 ]. Other viral disease outbreaks such as H1N1 and SARS have also affected Malaysia, but none have caused as deep an impact on society as the current COVID-19 pandemic. Similar to other countries, Malaysia has faced challenges in containing the virus and in urging the general public to comply with preventive measures introduced by the government. The first measure that was implemented was the restriction of entry visas from Wuhan City after three Chinese citizens tested positive for COVID-19 in Malaysia on 25th January 2020 [ 6 ]. Subsequently, with the rapid rise in local cases, a country level lock-down with a Movement Control Order (MCO) was implemented starting on 18th March 2020, raising the alarm of potential threat to national security [ 7 , 8 , 9 ].

An MCO is only effective if there is adherence by the public as the virus spreads via human-to-human transmission. With the increasing burden of cases in the country, mirroring the spread that also occurred internationally, an urgent focus of the government was to prevent the spread and reduce the number of infected cases, thus relieving the strain on health resources. Various preventive measures such as the use of face masks, personal hygiene, restriction of travelling and physical distancing were necessary since vaccines are only just becoming available [ 10 ]. The outbreak occurred in an unprecedented manner, causing a burden that was felt by every level of the society. Members of society were urged to assume relevant responsibilities in controlling the spread of this disease, by complying with the MCO. Nevertheless, the action of each individual in adhering to the MCO may vary depending on each person’s perceptions of the disease. Thus, solely relying on community mitigation measures during a pandemic has limitations as it is difficult to change habitual behaviour such as hygiene and social interaction [ 11 ]. An evaluation of public knowledge and perception of SARS in Hong Kong showed that enhanced personal hygiene and health protective measures relied critically on public psychological responses and widespread perceptions and beliefs of the community at large [ 12 ]. The research group found considerable misinformation and false beliefs among the community in Hong Kong at an advanced stage of the SARS epidemic, despite the wide coverage and substantial mass media and public service announcements. Hence, public perception is very important in improving health risk communication, building public trust and cooperating with the government’s preventive effort to control an outbreak [ 13 ].

Combating viral outbreaks extends beyond biomedical and clinical approaches; thus, public health prevention measures are equally important. Hence, it is essential to understand the Malaysian public response to COVID-19 preventive measures. Malaysians should practise social responsibility by complying with the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and guidelines imposed by the government [ 9 , 14 ]. Public engagement in preventive efforts can be viewed as the social responsibility of individuals in controlling an infectious disease [ 15 ] and are subject to change due to human behaviour. While human behaviour is complex, many health behaviour models have been developed to understand health, behaviour and health system phenomena by incorporating various features of individuals, communities and organisations. Other health behaviour models include the health belief model [ 16 ] and the COM-B model [ 17 ]. Although the health belief model was established to study health-related phenomena [ 18 , 19 , 20 ], it has a limitation that it does not directly incorporate societal features such as social norms and community assumptions, which are assumed in underlying demographic factors [ 21 ]. The COM-B model introduced Capability, Opportunity and Motivation into a model by focusing on promoting individual behaviour adherence to public health interventions [ 22 ].

Studying human behaviour extends beyond the individual’s level and it involves examining collective efforts and societal participation. Understanding how people conceptualise social responsibility during an outbreak can provide useful information for improving future preventive and control interventions. Hence, this study aims to explore public conceptualisation of social responsibility and to develop a model explaining the role of social responsibility during the early COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia.

Study design

In-line with the aim of developing an explanatory substantive theory explaining the role of social responsibility during the early COVID-19 outbreak, the grounded theory methodology was adopted [ 23 ]. An in-depth interview (IDI) was used to capture emic perspectives and provided a detailed account of a person’s view, reactions (personal responsibility) and social processes (social responsibility) among the general public during the early COVID-19 outbreak in Malaysia. The purposive sampling strategy was used with the intention of exploring a range of individuals from various social backgrounds and different experiences encountered in relation to the current pandemic. Subsequently, the theoretical sampling was applied to aid the saturation of the model, which enabled enrichment of data that could illustrate the process of how individuals perceived societal role responsibility within the outbreak environment. This led to the identification of a ‘core category’ for this study and the theoretical saturation.

Recruitment & participants

Participants were purposively recruited from different demographic backgrounds to elicit their diverse experience during the early COVID-19 outbreak. Potential participants were identified from the social networks of the research team as well as referrals by the social network among their friends. All participants selected resided in different locations within Malaysia when the interview was conducted. In total, 23 Malaysian adults with various sociodemographic were interviewed. Figure  1 shows the locations of study participants.

Malaysia map with locations of the selected participants. *Notes: respondents = study participants

Data collection

The interviews were conducted between March to July 2020 by researchers who were trained in qualitative method. The movement restriction order that was implemented during the worsening stages of COVID-19 outbreak in Malaysia [ 8 ] limited physical accessibility to conduct face-to-face interviews. This limitation was surmounted by conducting telephone interview. Hence, only one IDI was conducted face-to-face at the workplace based on the participant’s request, while the other 22 IDIs were through telephone interviews. A semi-structured interview guide was developed to facilitate IDI sessions, containing a list of questions pertaining to the understanding of COVID-19, “perceptions on the outbreak progression and consequences of the outbreak on everyday lives and activities”, “experiences and perceptions upon searching for and receiving COVID-19 information”, further probing to explore their “ways in handling the information received and reasons behind their actions”. Participants were also asked about their “activities and perceptions in complying with the public health interventions imposed by authorities during the outbreak”. The interviews sessions lasted between 25 and 110 min. They were conducted either in English, Malay or Mandarin language depending on the participant’s preference. Participant information sheet which included study objective, the purpose of the interview and the interview process was shared through email or WhatsApp message prior to the interview and informed consent was obtained from all participants. Assurance of confidentiality was given that data would be used only for this study. All IDIs were transcribed verbatim and cross-checked against audio recording by another team member to ensure accuracy of the transcripts. Data collection continued until data saturation. Upon interviewing 23 participants, no new emerging theme was observed from two consecutive IDIs. No repeat interviews were carried out since the information gaps were probed in the subsequent interviews.

The interviews were audio-taped as permitted by the participants, transcribed and imported into the Nvivo 11 (Qualitative data analysis computer software) to facilitate data analysis. Participants’ identifiers were replaced with researcher-assigned codes to maintain the anonymity of the transcripts prior to analysis. Data analysis began immediately after the first interview. Theoretical saturation was observed and achieved after 23 interviews, whereby no new categories were found to add further understanding of the complex human behaviour and social responsibility in facing the early COVID-19 outbreak. Data analysis involved various stages of coding, memoing, sketching and modelling. Coding began with open coding, followed by identifying categories and grouping. The coding process started with immersion in the data, whereby the texts were read several times before they were coded. Focus coding was carried out subsequently, followed by a theoretical coding. Eventually, the core category was identified, and the study theoretical framework was conceptualised. The core category “negotiation” was identified based on its ability to subsume the main categories in explaining the entire process of an individual’s conceptualisation of social responsibility and how they exercised their social responsibility.

The research team consisted of multi-disciplinary researchers with various experiences, composing those with experience in behavioural sciences (medical anthropologist), public health and clinical research, health systems research and primary care services. Trained in qualitative research and interviewing techniques, all research team members are fluent in English and Malay languages and a few are also fluent in Mandarin.

Ethical considerations

This study was registered with the National Medical Research Register (NMRR-20-574-54389). Ethical approval was granted by the Medical Research and Ethics Committee, Ministry of Health Malaysia (KKM/NIHSEC/ P20-701(7)). Participants’ identity and data confidentiality were assured throughout the data collection. Informed consent to participate and permission for audio recording were obtained from all participants prior to interviews.

The results of this study were obtained from in-depth interviews with 23 individuals from the general public between March to July 2020 in Malaysia. Table  1 summarises the characteristics of the participants. More than half were female (69.6%), Malay ethnic group (52.2%) and 78.3% of them had at least a tertiary education level. They ranged from 29 to 73 years old, work as public civil servants (39.1%), in private sector (39.1%) and 21.8% were retirees.

From the perspective of an individual’s obligation to act for the benefit of society, the participants conceptualised social responsibility from two dimensions: (1) the individual perceived roles in their society, and (2) the individual perceived circle of responsibility. To finally exercise social responsibility would involve individuals considering the perceived risk of infection.

The individual perceived role defines their actions. The extent of the action regarding the level of societal involvement depends on how wide a person casts his or her circle of responsibility in the society. Individuals often hold multiple roles; thus, their respective circles of responsibility vary, as are their actions. The individuals’ perception of infection risk is constructed from their response to information received and their self-efficacy in possible risk modification. Under a pandemic circumstance, the recommended preventive measures such as movement restriction, personal hygiene and the use of protective equipment are negotiated from this perspective of societal role responsibility. The negotiation involves reaching an agreement [ 24 ] and in the context whether one would decide to take the preventive measures deemed necessary. This negotiation is produced by the intersection between societal role responsibility and perceived infection risk.

Figure  2 shows the theoretical model, which illustrates that the individuals’ actions of social responsibility are a result of the intersection between perceived infection risk and societal role responsibility. These two are negotiated. The individuals’ perceived infection risk is constructed from their response to the information received and their self-efficacy in risk modification.

Public response to preventive measures from social responsibility perspective during the COVID-19 outbreak

Perceived societal role responsibility

The societal role is the perception of an individual. This role varies according to the context and current time since it depends on the type of relationship involved. A person can be a member of a workplace, family or society. Each role has a sense of responsibility attached to it, with obligations to be carried out by the individuals as members of the society. The type of relationship determines how far a person casts his or her circle of responsibility. There are two dimensions of societal role responsibility: the perceived role and the circle of responsibility.

Perceived role

The perceived role, which comes with a set of expected behaviours and conduct, influences a person’s decision in determining the best action [ 25 ]. A person can and often has multiple roles, but they only assume one role at a moment in time. For example, a person could be a mother who may also be a healthcare worker and an event host. Depending on her role in each situation, she would assume the role of a mother or a healthcare worker and think of the best interest for her children in some situations, and patients in other situations respectively.

A groom’s mother who was expected to take care of the guests’ safety in a wedding function stated the following:

“I am a mother, who was just about to organise my son’s wedding at that time. It was…not MCO yet, but it’s still in warning status…where we can still organise feast…. we’d like to hold the wedding…but in a safe way, as you would have to invite a lot of guests.” (P09, female, 52 y/o).

If a person became the host for a social event, he or she would be responsible for the comfort and safety of the guests. Despite his or her desire to host the event during the outbreak, the person was driven to consider the safety of others. Therefore, on the basis of the guests’ safety, he or she might cancel the event.

A social event host who was expected to take responsibility for his guests’ safety expressed:

“I wanted to keep it going but I was persuaded by my family to cancel it. I wasn’t really concerned about the epidemic, but it was getting serious and I got scared. What if the virus infected other people?” (P05, male, 29 y/o).

Similarly, a grandmother perceiving her responsibility towards the health of her grandsons stated:

“We always wear the mask, even for small kids, my little grandson. I wear it for him even though he doesn’t want to.” (P23, female, 61 y/o).

Circle of responsibility

The circle of responsibility depends on the size of the person’s definition of his or her social responsibility. There is a continuum of self, which is the smallest circle of responsibility, to as large a definition of society as one can perceive. The large circle of responsibility can stretch to include the global society and produce a more ‘collective effort’. The word ‘circle’ indicates that the circle can expand to a degree at the personal, society, national or global levels. Thus, the definition of this circle is personal, and defining it involves identifying the weight an individual would place on the importance of his or her personal goals such as health, enjoyment, life value, financial matters and societal relationship.

“[I wear] a mask because we [healthcare provider] are contacting patient in hospital, so we have… to protect ourselves” (P13, female, 33 y/o).

With the same act of adhering to public health measures, a large circle of responsibility expands beyond the self with the intention of avoiding spreading the disease to others.

“When I’m back from work or the supermarket, I must clean myself before meeting my family. I’m staying with my mom. When I’m back, I’ll shower before meeting her because as an elder, she’s at-risk group.” (P21, female, 45 y/o).

The “perceived societal role responsibility” cannot, by itself, explain a person’s societal behaviour regarding the pandemic; however, it forms the foundation for negotiation with a person’s perceived infection risk for an action he or she would take for preventive measures. While an intention to act may be present, the decision to act is balanced with the perceived infection risk.

Perceived COVID-19 infection risk

Since the content of pandemic information includes risk of exposure and the protective measures, the perceived infection risk among members of the society is an outcome of an individual’s assessment of how high the risk of contracting the infection and the possibility of reducing the risk through protective measures. Before the government announced COVID-19 mitigation strategies, some individuals developed early risk perception and practised preventive measures after discovering local disease spread. However, other individuals perceived the risk only when the government enforced an MCO, indicating an imminent risk of infection. With increasingly government intervention, which indicated a widespread disease transmission, individuals began to perceive a higher risk of infection and considered reducing the risk through some protective measures.

“When it began to spread here [in Malaysia] at that time…two weeks before the Prime Minister announced [the MCO], I was already scared of…this virus. Then, I started wearing a mask.” (P07, female, 61 y/o).

“I was a person that not really taking serious about this [pandemic], but when the government started to announce the lock-down or the movement restriction, that kind of [action] make me nervous… [that was] the point where I think… I have changed from not care to… give more concerned about it.” (P05, male, 29 y/o).

How an individual comprehends the disease risk depends on a few factors:

Reliability of information source

Insight into COVID-19 serves as the starting point from which an individual understands the risk and determines how to respond. Initially, COVID-19 information was available from multiple sources, allowing a person to create his or her personal perception of the information. The source and type of COVID-19 information varied, each carrying a different weight and reliability as perceived by the individual. At one end of the information spectrum is the verified information from credible sources such as announcements by health authorities and global news. An individual tends to value such information, especially the information received from recognised sources and media.

“I used to buy newspapers every day. So, usually I read papers, and then you see in the TV, the CNN and…other news.” (P02, male, 73 y/o).

In contrast, unverified social media such as Twitter, WhatsApp and Facebook are also sources of information for the public. However, the information from these sources carried less weight and was perceived as being less reliable.

“At that time, they (from Facebook) said that [MAEPS 8,24 ] was for those who came back from overseas (quarantine centre). Then, I WhatsApp my sister…because those who stayed in Malaysia knew better about it (to verify the information).” (P23, female, 61 y/o).

The source and type of COVID-19 information ranged from newspaper reports to individual opinions from respectable professionals. These sources were considered in variable weight and reliability.

“We have a number of people in our group…who are politicians and doctors. There are public health doctors in the group as well. All of us… [thought that] it’s okay to go to Australia… after all, Australia is safer than Malaysia. All the reports [showed that]… all the cases in Australia were in Sydney, Gold Coast, not in Perth. We were prepared to go actually…” (P03, female, 64 y/o).

The perceived risk of contracting the infection from public exposure

Risk through public exposure is perceived as how easy an individual could contract the infection while in public places. An individual perceived risk based on risk characteristics such as the infectious nature of the disease, proximity of infection based on the geographical spread, the similarity of social-cultural factors among infected individuals and one’s own susceptibility due to health status. A high perceived infection risk indicates that the infectious agent was easily spread, as well as positive cases were occurring in close proximity and in similar socio-cultural setting. A person also perceived high risk after assessing a location with high incidence of cases within their surroundings.

“At first, when I looked at the Wuhan [condition]…I wasn’t afraid yet, I thought it only happened in Wuhan and wouldn’t reach Malaysia, it’s just Wuhan.” (P07, female, 61 y/o).

“Once it reached Malaysia, I mean, Wuhan and Malaysia are far from each other. So, when it reached Malaysia, it’s quite bad… I assumed that it could be prolonged and turn into a pandemic.” (P11, female, 29 y/o).

“I did not take this [COVID-19] seriously…and then there was actually…a new virus. They firstly say it comes out from the wild animals where they [people in China] eat wild animal… Malaysian less likely to take these wild animals.” (P04, female, 33 y/o).

Possibility of risk modification through protective measures

An individual’s perceived infection risk could also be altered by their confidence in adopting some protection measures. The possibility of an individual engaging in risk modification is a personal evaluation of the effectiveness of protective measures, which may or may not be according to recommended guides or SOP. Confidence in protective measures is developed when the outcome of practising protective measures was evaluated and perceived as successful compared to the absence of protective measures.

“I have confidence in preventive measures because…before this, my child went to a childcare centre…mingled with other kids, who had fever and everything. So, my child always gets a fever. When he was staying at home, he never had any fever. I believe in… the importance of social distancing to protect us from COVID-19.” (P21, female, 45 y/o).

The negotiation

Public response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was reflected by their actions during the pandemic, was preceded by their corresponding intentions to act. The intentions were constructed from their perceived societal role responsibility. These intentions to finally complete the act were negotiated after they considered their perception of the risk of infection. As part of the ‘negotiation’, placing a heavy weight on one’s self in the societal role responsibility may tilt the balance towards an act that benefits one’s own agenda over infection risk. For instance, a person could undervalue infection risk over an important social event.

“…but then again at that time, [it was] not so serious that you would protest against an assignment or project… So, that’s why I took the flight anyway.” (P14, male, 33 y/o).

A person has the autonomy to decide what is best for himself or herself amidst the outbreak and the government’s restriction order. Hence, his or her decision also illustrated how far a person could align himself to societal goals without disregarding personal goals.

“I’m worried because… the reception cannot be carried out. If we postpone [the wedding ceremony], we would never know when coronavirus is going to end. It could take one year, two years…five or six months. So, it would have been postponed due to an endless thing.” (P18, female, 33 y/o).

In a different context, a person’s perceived societal roles vary, as does the perceived infection risk. Figure  3 illustrates these negotiations and the resulting range of actions from a spectrum quadrant of the the two factors of perceived societal roles and perceived infection risk. The spectrums include the following: perceived high infection risk and small circle of societal role responsibility; perceived high infection risk and large circle of societal role responsibility; perceived low infection risk and small societal role responsibility; and perceived low infection risk and large societal role responsibility.

Intersection between perceived societal role responsibility and COVID-19 infection risk

Quadrant 1 Perceived high infection risk and perceived small circle of societal role responsibility

Perceived high risk of infection during a pandemic, places an individual at a “threatened” state of mind, thus invoking one’s “safeguarding” or “protecting” nature. However, from the perspective of a small role and circle of responsibility, the action was negotiated within the context of oneself and his or her safety, resulting in containing the action without intending to influence the behaviour of others.

“We have to get prepared [to wear a mask]… because the awareness of people around us is not very high, so we have to protect ourselves.” (P13, female, 33 y/o, perceived role: self).

Quadrant 2 Perceived high infection risk and perceived large societal role responsibility

Similarly, for a person who perceived a high infection risk with the perspective of a large role and circle of responsibility, the focus of his or her concerns expanded from oneself to others, especially those within the circle of care. The individual’s action was negotiated towards a proactive approach, aiming to mitigate others’ exposure to infection risk or influence others to reduce risky behaviour.

“If I go [abroad] and know that Spain is already very badly affected, I don’t want to be one of the culprits that bring back the virus. I think that [is] very irresponsible… Even though I self-quarantine at home, I don’t think it’s good…” (P06, female, 58 y/o, perceived role: a responsible citizen).

Quadrant 3 Perceived low infection risk and perceived small societal role responsibility

Perceived low risk of infection and small societal role responsibility placed an individual at ease and did not invoke the need to protect oneself or the society from the disease. As such, a perceived low infection risk of infection did not trigger an individual to adhere to preventive measures. The actions were negotiated for the benefit of oneself, guided by personal needs and interests. He or she was less concerned with the consequences of their actions on the society.

“Well, there’s nothing to be afraid of… I had this sea license by [the authority] when [the police] asked me where to go; I would just tell him that I am going to catch cockle. Our hobby is to go out to sea…and no one spreads (virus) to you.” (P17, male, 63 y/o, perceived role: self).

Quadrant 4 Perceived low infection risk and perceived large societal role responsibility

A person who perceived a low infection risk might not discern the necessity to negotiate a change of action or decision that has been made thus far. However, adequate information necessary for carrying out risk modification would be negotiated with the perceived large society role responsibility of a person. Eventually, some protective measures were adopted, and the benefit and safety of others would be taken into consideration.

“…rumours said that MCO might be enforced. People began asking me if the wedding would be continued. Since there’s no announcement yet, if Allah wills, we would continue it but after the announcement, we updated them that we could only do the marriage ceremony specifically for closed family members.” (P18, female, 33 y/o, perceived role: a host).

Action – response to COVID-19 preventive measure

Action is the outcome of the negotiation between perceived societal role responsibility and perceived infection risk. An individual might take preventive measures by complying with the SOP such as wearing a mask, cancelling his or her social event, avoiding crowded places and reducing activities or social events. However, the notion of social responsibility for each action was shaped by the negotiation. As the conceptualisation of social responsibility differs across individuals, a person’s action during a pandemic may also vary contextually.

Another action a person can take is sharing information. In a specific situation, such as the COVID-19 outbreak, delivering information about the outbreak or preventive measures was similar to risk communication. However, there was a sense of control over information sharing. For example, a healthcare worker acted as a gatekeeper for information that he or she received directly from his or her work organisation. Whether or not the worker should share information with family members or friends depended on his or her personal decision.

“Sometimes when I get news from MKN [National Security Council] or CPRC [National Crisis Preparedness and Response Centre] which I feel should be shared with my family members or friends, I will do that.” (P08, female, 56 y/o).

A person’s action can also help prevent the spread of infection for self-protection or for public good. A person who perceived a larger societal role responsibility included the safety of oneself and others in his or her actions to prevent the spread of infection by adhering to specific SOPs.

“The best thing is just to try to avoid gathering, because I got…two risk [groups]… My father-in-law…they are old….and my kids. So, I don’t want to be infected by this thing and bring it to my family.” (P15, male, 35 y/o).

The individual’s action is generally similar for those who perceive high infection risk, but there is a variation in explaining their actions from the perspective of social role responsibility. He or she would generally adhere to guidelines during a pandemic. However, one’s actions vary considerably when he or she perceives low infection risk.

This study developed a substantive theoretical model to illustrate the process of how individuals responded to an early COVID-19 outbreak from the perspective of social responsibility. Individual response to COVID-19 was directly constructed from their perceived societal role responsibilities and further negotiated after considering the risk of infection. “Negotiation” was identified as an important intersection within this process. The different spectrums of social responsibility within an individual and among the society during the pandemic were noted to be the foundation for this negotiation to take place.

A pandemic urgently requires multi-disciplinary teams to work together, including and not limited to public health, clinical scientists, pharmaceutical industry and health policy specialists. The public also plays a significant role in mitigating the situation. Hence, understanding human behaviour is equally important since personal behaviour is a key factor in reducing the transmission of respiratory viruses [ 22 ]. Social scientists have acknowledged the importance of understanding the COVID-19 pandemic response from the social and behavioural lens and have highlighted some insights for outbreak preparedness [ 26 ]. Other public health frameworks such as the Health Belief Model [ 16 , 21 ] and the COM-B Model [ 22 ] may provide behaviour diagnosis and reinforce mitigation behaviours during the outbreak of COVID-19 through careful arrangement of compliance with public health measures. The Health Belief model [ 21 ] focuses on the perceived threat, benefits, barriers and efficacy in mitigating the COVID-19 infection and focuses on the person’s perception of the disease; however, the health belief model does not incorporate society perspective although the pandemic is a condition closely related to the society [ 16 ]. The COM-B model has described a wide range of principles that can encourage individuals to engage in COVID-19 preventive behaviour [ 22 ]. The COM-B model indicates that preventive behaviour can only be practised when an individual has both the capability and the opportunity to show this behaviour; individuals are more motivated to choose personal protective behaviour. It shows that three components (Capability, Opportunity and Motivation) are closely linked to a person’s behaviour. COM-B model states that capability and opportunity are the primary parts of the model; however, during the MCO period, capability and opportunity were present, variation in behaviour remain.

Our model provides the additional contextual perspectives of the effect of infection risk, societal role and responsibilities perceived by individuals in negotiating behaviour for preventing COVID-19 infections. The government and many other authorised agencies may play a crucial role in influencing individual health behaviour but only to some extent. Our model implies that individuals exercise autonomy in determining which action to take when mitigating COVID-19 infection. Motivation to modify behaviour is contextual since it is derived from perceived societal role responsibility and infection risk. Our model provides a contextual relevance of undesirable behaviours. The MCO is seen as an undesirable event, and there was a tension between self and society as highlighted in our model. The important process of “negotiation” results in variation of behaviour, corresponding to perceived infection risk, whether low or otherwise. Importantly, our model presents a novel context – the context of pandemic; furthermore, it shows that undesirable behaviour is easy to engage with during the pandemic. Thus, capability and opportunity as highlighted in the COM-B model can be applicable during this situation. However, motivation varies across individuals, which is where our model offers substantive value.

Social responsibility is a perceived value which is significantly apparent across layers of society. However, application of social responsibility is commonly understood at the corporate level, which is defined as “any ‘responsible’ activity that allows a firm to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage, regardless of motive” [ 27 , 28 ]. The individual perspective is equally important. From the same perspective, collective efforts in facilitating health improvement have gradually emphasised personal control over individual health behaviour through health education in order to create a collective social responsibility [ 29 ]. Such efforts were driven by the assumption that each individual could change societal norms through their habits or modifications of their lifestyles [ 30 ]. In 1986, the WHO promoted health as “a process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve their health” [ 31 ]. The conventional health education is disease-oriented and has been used extensively in managing communicable and non-communicable diseases. In this study, we found the individual’s perspective was useful in analysing public health interventions during a pandemic situation. We found that an individual’s action is shaped by the tension between individual agenda and social responsibility, before the negotiation with perceived infection risk. This model provides a framework for Malaysian social responsibility during the COVID-19 outbreak and insights into understanding the interplaying elements. The time frame of the interviews was in the early stages of the outbreak in Malaysia, around the same time the MCO commenced; this was considered in the analysis of the findings. Nevertheless, these perceptions depict an early visualisation of individuals’ response to a pandemic and potentially shifts accordingly as the pandemic progresses.

Policy implication, strengths and limitations

In terms of policy implication, our model explains that the action of a person during the early COVID-19 pandemic was the outcome of the “negotiation” between perceived societal role responsibility and perceived risk infection. In order to influence an individual’s response to an outbreak, the information provided to the public needs to articulate the exact role a person should play. Associations and organisations can empower members of the society by emphasising their potential roles during the pandemic and recommend actions. However, the spectrum of social responsibility in a different context indicates that human behaviour is complex, and a person’s action is influenced by the negotiation within a person. Hence, risk communication strategies could incorporate the element of negotiation, with clear SOPs that portray the importance of social responsibility during a pandemic. Authority figures could optimise various platforms to play their specific roles, such as an educator, adviser, or informer to alert society members and protect the public. Our model is useful for developing new norms during a pandemic and future intervention for behaviour change by emphasizing human negotiation behaviour.

By adopting a grounded theory approach, this study provides a substantive theory derived from emerging empirical data that attempts to explain the societal role responsibility during the COVID-19 outbreak. To enhance the theory, the sampling strategy used purposeful and theoretical sampling to ensure a maximum variation of demography and data collection within the context of an outbreak. In addition, the findings from this study can provide insight to various stakeholders, from health managers to policy makers, to strengthen preparedness for future outbreaks by understanding the spectrum of individual behaviours. The results from the ground up yielded valuable information with relevance to an outbreak context. Nevertheless, the context was in Malaysian, in the early stages of the outbreak, when resources and economic factors were not a major issue.

The role of social responsibility has not been explored extensively in the academic literature, though it has been mentioned by country leaders and in risk communication materials. Our study adopted the grounded theory approach to develop a theoretical model that illustrates how individual response to early stage of COVID-19 preventive measure is the outcome of the negotiation between perceived societal role responsibility and perceived infection risk. The matrix diagram with the four types of behaviour facilitates the understanding of the abstract concept of negotiation in individual’s decision-making process. It also provides the spectrum of different types of behaviour in relation to public response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the model was conceptualised during the early stage of COVID-19 outbreak in Malaysia, we believe the model has relevance for adoption within the similar context of a disease outbreak.

Availability of data and materials

The dataset that support the findings of this article belongs to this study (The role of social responsibility during COVID-19 outbreak, NMRR-20-574-54389). At present, the data are not publicly available but can be obtained from the corresponding author and Head of Centre for Biostatistics & Data Repository, National Institutes of Health, Ministry of Health Malaysia on reasonable request and with the permission from the Director General of Health, Malaysia.

Abbreviations

Capability, Opportunity and Motivation Behaviour

in-depth interview

Movement Control Order

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2

Standard Operating Procedure

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Director General of Health Malaysia for the permission to publish this paper. The authors are also immensely grateful to all participants who participated in this study. We would like to thank Mr Jabrullah AB Hamid, the GIS analyst for generating image for the purpose of this publication.

This study was made possible with funding from the National Institutes of Health, Ministry of Health Malaysia research grant [(110)KKM/NIHSEC/800-3/2/2 Jld.10]. Publication of this article was sponsored by the Ministry of Health Malaysia. The funder is a stakeholder of the study but did not participate in the study process.

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Low, L.L., Tong, S.F., Ang, J.Y. et al. Social responsibility perspective in public response to the COVID-19 pandemic: a grounded theory approach. BMC Public Health 22 , 469 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-12819-4

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The complexity of managing COVID-19: How important is good governance?

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Alaka m. basu , amb alaka m. basu professor, department of global development - cornell university, senior fellow - united nations foundation kaushik basu , and kaushik basu nonresident senior fellow - global economy and development jose maria u. tapia jmut jose maria u. tapia student - cornell university.

November 17, 2020

• 13 min read

This essay is part of “ Reimagining the global economy: Building back better in a post-COVID-19 world ,” a collection of 12 essays presenting new ideas to guide policies and shape debates in a post-COVID-19 world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the inadequacy of public health systems worldwide, casting a shadow that we could not have imagined even a year ago. As the fog of confusion lifts and we begin to understand the rudiments of how the virus behaves, the end of the pandemic is nowhere in sight. The number of cases and the deaths continue to rise. The latter breached the 1 million mark a few weeks ago and it looks likely now that, in terms of severity, this pandemic will surpass the Asian Flu of 1957-58 and the Hong Kong Flu of 1968-69.

Moreover, a parallel problem may well exceed the direct death toll from the virus. We are referring to the growing economic crises globally, and the prospect that these may hit emerging economies especially hard.

The economic fall-out is not entirely the direct outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic but a result of how we have responded to it—what measures governments took and how ordinary people, workers, and firms reacted to the crisis. The government activism to contain the virus that we saw this time exceeds that in previous such crises, which may have dampened the spread of the COVID-19 but has extracted a toll from the economy.

This essay takes stock of the policies adopted by governments in emerging economies, and what effect these governance strategies may have had, and then speculates about what the future is likely to look like and what we may do here on.

Nations that build walls to keep out goods, people and talent will get out-competed by other nations in the product market.

It is becoming clear that the scramble among several emerging economies to imitate and outdo European and North American countries was a mistake. We get a glimpse of this by considering two nations continents apart, the economies of which have been among the hardest hit in the world, namely, Peru and India. During the second quarter of 2020, Peru saw an annual growth of -30.2 percent and India -23.9 percent. From the global Q2 data that have emerged thus far, Peru and India are among the four slowest growing economies in the world. Along with U.K and Tunisia these are the only nations that lost more than 20 percent of their GDP. 1

COVID-19-related mortality statistics, and, in particular, the Crude Mortality Rate (CMR), however imperfect, are the most telling indicator of the comparative scale of the pandemic in different countries. At first glance, from the end of October 2020, Peru, with 1039 COVID-19 deaths per million population looks bad by any standard and much worse than India with 88. Peru’s CMR is currently among the highest reported globally.

However, both Peru and India need to be placed in regional perspective. For reasons that are likely to do with the history of past diseases, there are striking regional differences in the lethality of the virus (Figure 11.1). South America is worse hit than any other world region, and Asia and Africa seem to have got it relatively lightly, in contrast to Europe and America. The stark regional difference cries out for more epidemiological analysis. But even as we await that, these are differences that cannot be ignored.

To understand the effect of policy interventions, it is therefore important to look at how these countries fare within their own regions, which have had similar histories of illnesses and viruses (Figure 11.2). Both Peru and India do much worse than the neighbors with whom they largely share their social, economic, ecological and demographic features. Peru’s COVID-19 mortality rate per million population, or CMR, of 1039 is ahead of the second highest, Brazil at 749, and almost twice that of Argentina at 679.

Similarly, India at 88 compares well with Europe and the U.S., as does virtually all of Asia and Africa, but is doing much worse than its neighbors, with the second worst country in the region, Afghanistan, experiencing less than half the death rate of India.

The official Indian statement that up to 78,000 deaths 2 were averted by the lockdown has been criticized 3 for its assumptions. A more reasonable exercise is to estimate the excess deaths experienced by a country that breaks away from the pattern of its regional neighbors. So, for example, if India had experienced Afghanistan’s COVID-19 mortality rate, it would by now have had 54,112 deaths. And if it had the rate reported by Bangladesh, it would have had 49,950 deaths from COVID-19 today. In other words, more than half its current toll of some 122,099 COVID-19 deaths would have been avoided if it had experienced the same virus hit as its neighbors.

What might explain this outlier experience of COVID-19 CMRs and economic downslide in India and Peru? If the regional background conditions are broadly similar, one is left to ask if it is in fact the policy response that differed markedly and might account for these relatively poor outcomes.

Peru and India have performed poorly in terms of GDP growth rate in Q2 2020 among the countries displayed in Table 2, and given that both these countries are often treated as case studies of strong governance, this draws attention to the fact that there may be a dissonance between strong governance and good governance.

The turnaround for India has been especially surprising, given that until a few years ago it was among the three fastest growing economies in the world. The slowdown began in 2016, though the sharp downturn, sharper than virtually all other countries, occurred after the lockdown.

On the COVID-19 policy front, both India and Peru have become known for what the Oxford University’s COVID Policy Tracker 4 calls the “stringency” of the government’s response to the epidemic. At 8 pm on March 24, 2020, the Indian government announced, with four hours’ notice, a complete nationwide shutdown. Virtually all movement outside the perimeter of one’s home was officially sought to be brought to a standstill. Naturally, as described in several papers, such as that of Ray and Subramanian, 5 this meant that most economic life also came to a sudden standstill, which in turn meant that hundreds of millions of workers in the informal, as well as more marginally formal sectors, lost their livelihoods.

In addition, tens of millions of these workers, being migrant workers in places far-flung from their original homes, also lost their temporary homes and their savings with these lost livelihoods, so that the only safe space that beckoned them was their place of origin in small towns and villages often hundreds of miles away from their places of work.

After a few weeks of precarious living in their migrant destinations, they set off, on foot since trains and buses had been stopped, for these towns and villages, creating a “lockdown and scatter” that spread the virus from the city to the town and the town to the village. Indeed, “lockdown” is a bit of a misnomer for what happened in India, since over 20 million people did exactly the opposite of what one does in a lockdown. Thus India had a strange combination of lockdown some and scatter the rest, like in no other country. They spilled out and scattered in ways they would otherwise not do. It is not surprising that the infection, which was marginally present in rural areas (23 percent in April), now makes up some 54 percent of all cases in India. 6

In Peru too, the lockdown was sudden, nationwide, long drawn out and stringent. 7 Jobs were lost, financial aid was difficult to disburse, migrant workers were forced to return home, and the virus has now spread to all parts of the country with death rates from it surpassing almost every other part of the world.

As an aside, to think about ways of implementing lockdowns that are less stringent and geographically as well as functionally less total, an example from yet another continent is instructive. Ethiopia, with a COVID-19 death rate of 13 per million population seems to have bettered the already relatively low African rate of 31 in Table 1. 8

We hope that human beings will emerge from this crisis more aware of the problems of sustainability.

The way forward

We next move from the immediate crisis to the medium term. Where is the world headed and how should we deal with the new world? Arguably, that two sectors that will emerge larger and stronger in the post-pandemic world are: digital technology and outsourcing, and healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

The last 9 months of the pandemic have been a huge training ground for people in the use of digital technology—Zoom, WebEx, digital finance, and many others. This learning-by-doing exercise is likely to give a big boost to outsourcing, which has the potential to help countries like India, the Philippines, and South Africa.

Globalization may see a short-run retreat but, we believe, it will come back with a vengeance. Nations that build walls to keep out goods, people and talent will get out-competed by other nations in the product market. This realization will make most countries reverse their knee-jerk anti-globalization; and the ones that do not will cease to be important global players. Either way, globalization will be back on track and with a much greater amount of outsourcing.

To return, more critically this time, to our earlier aside on Ethiopia, its historical and contemporary record on tampering with internet connectivity 9 in an attempt to muzzle inter-ethnic tensions and political dissent will not serve it well in such a post-pandemic scenario. This is a useful reminder for all emerging market economies.

We hope that human beings will emerge from this crisis more aware of the problems of sustainability. This could divert some demand from luxury goods to better health, and what is best described as “creative consumption”: art, music, and culture. 10 The former will mean much larger healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors.

But to take advantage of these new opportunities, nations will need to navigate the current predicament so that they have a viable economy once the pandemic passes. Thus it is important to be able to control the pandemic while keeping the economy open. There is some emerging literature 11 on this, but much more is needed. This is a governance challenge of a kind rarely faced, because the pandemic has disrupted normal markets and there is need, at least in the short run, for governments to step in to fill the caveat.

Emerging economies will have to devise novel governance strategies for doing this double duty of tamping down on new infections without strident controls on economic behavior and without blindly imitating Europe and America.

Here is an example. One interesting opportunity amidst this chaos is to tap into the “resource” of those who have already had COVID-19 and are immune, even if only in the short-term—we still have no definitive evidence on the length of acquired immunity. These people can be offered a high salary to work in sectors that require physical interaction with others. This will help keep supply chains unbroken. Normally, the market would have on its own caused such a salary increase but in this case, the main benefit of marshaling this labor force is on the aggregate economy and GDP and therefore is a classic case of positive externality, which the free market does not adequately reward. It is more a challenge of governance. As with most economic policy, this will need careful research and design before being implemented. We have to be aware that a policy like this will come with its risk of bribery and corruption. There is also the moral hazard challenge of poor people choosing to get COVID-19 in order to qualify for these special jobs. Safeguards will be needed against these risks. But we believe that any government that succeeds in implementing an intelligently-designed intervention to draw on this huge, under-utilized resource can have a big, positive impact on the economy 12 .

This is just one idea. We must innovate in different ways to survive the crisis and then have the ability to navigate the new world that will emerge, hopefully in the not too distant future.

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Note: We are grateful for financial support from Cornell University’s Hatfield Fund for the research associated with this paper. We also wish to express our gratitude to Homi Kharas for many suggestions and David Batcheck for generous editorial help.

• “GDP Annual Growth Rate – Forecast 2020-2022,” Trading Economics, https://tradingeconomics.com/forecast/gdp-annual-growth-rate.
• “Government Cites Various Statistical Models, Says Averted Between 1.4 Million-2.9 Million Cases Due To Lockdown,” Business World, May 23, 2020, www.businessworld.in/article/Government-Cites-Various-Statistical-Models-Says-Averted-Between-1-4-million-2-9-million-Cases-Due-To-Lockdown/23-05-2020-193002/.
• Suvrat Raju, “Did the Indian lockdown avert deaths?” medRxiv , July 5, 2020, https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr183813#A1.
• “COVID Policy Tracker,” Oxford University, https://github.com/OxCGRT/covid-policy-tracker t.
• Debraj Ray and S. Subramanian, “India’s Lockdown: An Interim Report,” NBER Working Paper, May 2020, https://www.nber.org/papers/w27282.
• Gopika Gopakumar and Shayan Ghosh, “Rural recovery could slow down as cases rise, says Ghosh,” Mint, August 19, 2020, https://www.livemint.com/news/india/rural-recovery-could-slow-down-as-cases-rise-says-ghosh-11597801644015.html.
• Pierina Pighi Bel and Jake Horton, “Coronavirus: What’s happening in Peru?,” BBC, July 9, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-53150808.
• “No lockdown, few ventilators, but Ethiopia is beating Covid-19,” Financial Times, May 27, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/7c6327ca-a00b-11ea-b65d-489c67b0d85d.
• Cara Anna, “Ethiopia enters 3rd week of internet shutdown after unrest,” Washington Post, July 14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/ethiopia-enters-3rd-week-of-internet-shutdown-after-unrest/2020/07/14/4699c400-c5d6-11ea-a825-8722004e4150_story.html.
• Patrick Kabanda, The Creative Wealth of Nations: Can the Arts Advance Development? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
• Guanlin Li et al, “Disease-dependent interaction policies to support health and economic outcomes during the COVID-19 epidemic,” medRxiv, August 2020, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.24.20180752v3.
• For helpful discussion concerning this idea, we are grateful to Turab Hussain, Daksh Walia and Mehr-un-Nisa, during a seminar of South Asian Economics Students’ Meet (SAESM).

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Coronavirus: the effect on human rights impact in the UK

As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads, people across the world face the devastating impact it is having now on families, friends and communities, and will continue to have long into the future. This is a human rights crisis in the most immediate sense – and a reminder of our common humanity and that we are all equal in dignity and human rights.

The international human rights system as we know it today was born from the lessons of the 1930s and 1940s and the hopes of a better future. Today, human rights are central to the situation we all face. At their heart, human rights are both a protection from the power of the state and a demand that our governments use their considerable power to protect our lives, health and wellbeing.

In the next days and weeks, we will analyse developments from a human rights perspective and publish updates. And as we do this, we will continue to scrutinise actions of governments here in the UK and elsewhere in the world in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

What we want to see from the government

All of us in the UK have responsibilities towards each other in this crisis, but the government has an overarching duty to protect our health and wellbeing. It can only fulfil its obligations if it puts human rights at the centre of its response.

In introducing emergency measures, it is vital from the outset that the UK Government ensures human rights are at the centre of all prevention, preparedness, containment and treatment efforts, in order to best protect public health, welfare, and support the groups and individuals most at risk from COVID-19.

The government must provide full economic support to protect people’s right to a home, to work and to an adequate standard of living. They will need to take action and extend the arms of state protection and support, perhaps more widely than ever before. 

These measures must focus first and foremost on the most vulnerable, those who are already struggling and those who are least protected.

Coronavirus Emergency Powers Bill

In these exceptional circumstances and the public health emergency, the government is introducing emergency powers. This must be done with care to protect and respect our human rights. These measures must be temporary, be subject to regular scrutiny. and undergo genuine review before any extension. The provisions in the Bill must be proportionate and any derogations of human rights must be in accord with international human rights law.

Who are those most at risk from Coronavirus?

The virus doesn’t discriminate, although we do know that certain groups appear to be at greater risk of severe illness and death. According to the WHO, older people and people with pre-existing medical conditions (such as asthma, diabetes or heart disease) seem to be more vulnerable to becoming severely ill with coronavirus.

People living in poverty and homelessness will find it much harder to access preventive measures. They may be working on zero-hour contracts, reliant on benefits and subject to punitive measures under the system of Universal Credit. 

We have seen how, in countries which have already been in lockdown, refuges and women’s organisations have been raising awareness of what self-isolation means for women living with violent and controlling partners. In the UK organisations working on domestic violence are chronically underfunded and, to date, no additional provision has been made to cope with the impact of coronavirus. Victims with ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ face additional barriers and insecurity as they cannot access life-saving refuges and are barred from other forms of public support. 

A shortage of care services (childcare, healthcare, elderly care) will have a disproportionate impact on women as providers of unpaid care work. Coronavirus will exacerbate a situation where cuts to public spending have already fallen on women. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has reiterated its previous concern (dating back to 2009) about the disproportionately negative impact of austerity measures on women, who constitute the vast majority of single parents and are more likely to be engaged in informal, temporary or precarious forms of employment.

How should the rights of the most vulnerable be protected?

We know that there are real challenges in the UK and Coronavirus is bringing these into sharp focus. In 2018, Professor Philip Alston – UN expert on extreme poverty and human rights – visited the UK and reported how 14 million people are living in poverty, dependent on food banks and charities for their next meal. He documented the plight of homeless people, some of whom don’t have a safe place for their children to sleep. Underpinning this he highlighted how successive governments eroded the healthcare system and undermined the social security safety net. In this context, we welcome the government’s commitment to food vouchers for children who get free school meals, and to keep schools open for frontline workers and vulnerable children.

Amnesty International and its partners have previously reported poor treatment of undocumented and irregular migrant people and their exclusion from services such as healthcare. This has been a feature of policy over successive governments and many years, whether by barring people from such services, making them unaffordable, or deterring their use by threat of being reported to immigration enforcement.  

The pandemic intensifies the risks these measures present to many already vulnerable people and the wider public. It is vital that their impact is urgently assessed and mitigated by the UK Government to ensure individual and public health. There should be no barrier to health care at this time.

How we’re coming together

While we see the stories of incidents of racism – acts driven by fear and ignorance – we also see how communities come together to support one another, through individual and collective acts of kindness, whether looking out for elderly neighbours or mass applause to demonstrate their appreciation to health workers. We’re proud that Amnesty International groups and activists are playing their part, offering support to those most in need in their communities.

What must be done next

We welcome measures including mortgage relief and support for businesses – but have been concerned by the significant gaps and questions that remained, including for those that are renting their homes. We are therefore pleased that the Prime Minister has announced he will act to protect renters from eviction. However, there’s no commitment to supporting those working on precarious contracts, often without sick pay or safety net and this need to be urgently addressed. So, while there is much to be welcomed, there is clearly a lot more that needs to be done and it is now vital that the government give equal focus to supporting those most vulnerable.  

The UK will survive the COVID-19 outbreak, not least thanks to the front-line services that put their lives on the line to deliver our right to health. But more than ever before, we need the government to do more to protect those who are already highly vulnerable, as well as those who may become so in the weeks and months ahead.

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The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is upending daily life for millions of people worldwide . 

More than 194,000 infections have been confirmed so far and more than 7,500 people have died, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). 

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, WHO warns. 

As the health crisis deepens, other crises are emerging. Lost jobs , mounting debts , looming evictions , and social isolation are just some of the disruptions societies are facing.  

“One thing that the pandemic is doing is laying bare the lack of baseline universal infrastructure that is meant for all of us,” Celina Su, the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies at the City of New York Graduate Center, told Global Citizen. “The pandemic could end up exacerbating inequalities and deepening poverty, but it’s also a canary in the coal mine by showing us in really tragic ways where we could all end up if we’re not as lucky later on.” 

“It shows us what we should be working toward always, not just in times of crisis,” she said, calling for universal health care, free child care, paid sick leave, unemployment benefits, and a stronger social safety net.

Amid the growing crisis, communities are showing inspiring solidarity, helping the most vulnerable face challenges and building networks for long-term assistance. 

“Right now, we’re supposed to be practicing social distancing, but how can we also practice social caring, social embracing, and social connection, all while physical distancing,” Su said. “What does that look like?”

Here are six ways communities are stepping up to support people and how you can join the relief effort.

1. Relief funds

As governments restrict public gatherings to slow the outbreak, businesses are getting shut down and people are losing their jobs around the world . 

Many of these people — especially undocumented immigrants — have little savings and could lose their homes, run out of food, and be unable to pay essential bills for the foreseeable future.

Governments globally are developing emergency relief packages to ease the burden, but in the meantime communities are creating crowdsourced relief funds to help people in need. 

The C19 Help Squad is providing immediate financial assistance to people throughout the US, while people in the UK have rallied to create more than 720 mutual aid groups , and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe have set up dedicated pages . 

Artists and activists are also among groups being impacted by the sudden cancelation of events, performances, and productions.

The music streaming service Spotify has launched the Spotify COVID-19 Music Relief project to help musicians who have been impacted by the pandemic. The company is matching up to $10 million in donations to a range of nonprofits helping musicians. Spotify is also working diligently to launch a feature that will enable artists to fundraise directly from fans during this challenging time. Soon, they will give artists the ability to drive listeners to a fundraising destination of their choice on their Spotify artist profile pages

The US-based Soze Foundation is partnering with TaskForce and Invisible Hand to launch an Artist and Activist Relief Fund , which has already raised over $21,000 to provide unrestricted $250 grants to selected applicants on an ongoing basis. 

Some businesses that have been forced to shut down to prevent public gatherings are also setting up relief funds for their employees and to ensure they can return to work once the pandemic passes. 

You can look for ways to help people in your community who are struggling financially by searching on social media, crowdfunding sites, or Google for local funds. 

2. Food banks

Volunteer, Pahola Campos hands out lunches to the Garcia family at a food distribution center set up by the Dream Center for those in need due to the coronavirus outbreak, March 16, 2020, in Los Angeles. Volunteer, Pahola Campos hands out lunches to the Garcia family at a food distribution center set up by the Dream Center for those in need due to the coronavirus outbreak, March 16, 2020, in Los Angeles. Image: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Food banks are a critical source of stability for any community facing a crisis — whether it’s a tropical storm, economic recession, or pandemic.

As the pandemic worsens, food banks around the world will face increased demand and fewer volunteers . 

You can donate to local food banks in your area to help families in need and, if you’re fully able to, you can volunteer at them to help sort and deliver supplies.  

As schools close around the world, parents are struggling to find ways to supervise their children during the day — this is especially true for people working in essential sectors such as healthcare and food. 

Once again, communities are rallying to support people in a bind. 

People who are suddenly working from home indefinitely are creating impromptu daycares and traditional day care centers are extending their hours to meet the demand . 

You can help by searching online and on social media for impromptu day care initiatives in your community that you can support if you’re healthy and able to, and by reaching out to friends, family, and neighbors who may need extra support. 

4. Remote teaching

Students who are home from school also have to maintain their school work amid the pandemic so that they can pick up where they left off once the pandemic subsides. 

For students with unreliable internet connections, unstable home residences, and other disruptions this will be extremely challenging. 

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 is achieving universal, quality education by 2030. Part of the goal includes providing students with a consistent, stable place to learn, and the ongoing pandemic is undermining this previously certain variable for many students.

Some internet providers are making wireless connections free for students to ensure their school lessons can continue. Various educators are also providing virtual lessons and educational content to help students stay engaged while stuck at home. 

Nonprofits like Scholastic , Save the Children , and UNICEF are stepping up to help students during this time. You can donate to these organizations, or support independent educators to promote education as the pandemic progresses. 

5. Remote companionship 

A young boy plays his trumpet from a balcony, in Pamplona, northern Spain, Wednesday, March 18, 2020. A young boy plays his trumpet from a balcony, in Pamplona, northern Spain, Wednesday, March 18, 2020. Image: Alvaro Barrientos/AP

Social distancing is necessary to curb the pandemic. It’s also going to be isolating and emotionally draining for people worldwide who will be cut off from regular companionship. 

In Italy, people have spontaneously orchestrated concerts from their balconies, while DJs and musicians are livestreaming sets for people .

Global Citizen has launched the #TogetherAtHome  livestream series for musicians to share intimate concerts and create a sense of global community. So far, Chris Martin and John Legend have performed , with many more scheduled for the coming days. Check out our social media channels to find out who’s next, and tune in! 

Meanwhile, virtual therapists have seen an exponential rise in demand , and friends everywhere are providing virtual support to each other . 

You can help ease people’s isolation by checking in on friends and family members, and joining online communities to provide companionship to people who are alone. 

6. Delivering goods and medicine 

People who have COVID-19 or who are highly vulnerable to complications from it are advised to stay away from crowded areas. That presents an obvious dilemma: how are they going to get food and medical supplies?

Fortunately, volunteers are stepping up to meet the demand and assist people who are unable to use regular delivery services for financial or other reasons. 

In Colorado, college students have created a service called “ Shopping Angels ” to shop for groceries and then deliver them to elderly people. In the UK, mutual aid groups are delivering medicine to people in need . 

You can join these efforts by either delivering supplies to elderly people in your life, or by supporting groups that are providing this service — look online and on social media to find out about groups in your community. 

“The most vulnerable don’t always have smart phones or internet access, so we have to figure out different nodes of connection,” Su said. “We have to figure out what their needs are and if we can connect existing resources to existing needs, and where there are needs beyond what we can provide as communities, we have to articulate these needs to elected officials.” 

While community efforts to support each other are vital, we also need action from governments to ensure all countries have the capacity and resources to reach people who need assistance.

You can join Global Citizen in calling on governments to contribute more resources to the fight against the pandemic through our Together At Home campaign  here . You can also take further actions like educating yourself about COVID-19 and how to stay healthy, and supporting and spreading the world on social media about the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. 

Su said we can also use this opportunity to reimagine the social contract, to reflect on the ways in which we are all interconnected, and how we can ensure society works better for all us in the aftermath of the crisis. 

“We have to change our mindset,” Su said. “We’re all in this together. This pandemic shows how none of us deserves [to suffer].”

She added: “This crisis is about asking what do we all want for the future, and what lessons can we take with us for future crises to better care for each other and to think about solidarity.”

You can see all of Global Citizen's COVID-19 coverage  here .

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Defeat Poverty

6 Ways You Can Help Your Community Respond to Coronavirus

March 18, 2020

The Fundamental Question of the Pandemic Is Shifting

We understand how this will end. But who bears the risk that remains?

During a pandemic , no one’s health is fully in their own hands. No field should understand that more deeply than public health, a discipline distinct from medicine. Whereas doctors and nurses treat sick individuals in front of them, public-health practitioners work to prevent sickness in entire populations. They are expected to think big. They know that infectious diseases are always collective problems because they are infectious . An individual’s choices can ripple outward to affect cities, countries, and continents; one sick person can seed a hemisphere’s worth of cases. In turn, each person’s odds of falling ill depend on the choices of everyone around them—and on societal factors, such as poverty and discrimination, that lie beyond their control.

Across 15 agonizing months, the COVID-19 pandemic repeatedly confirmed these central concepts. Many essential workers, who held hourly-wage jobs with no paid sick leave, were unable to isolate themselves for fear of losing their livelihood. Prisons and nursing homes, whose residents have little autonomy, became hot spots for the worst outbreaks. People in Black and Latino communities that were underserved by the existing health system were disproportionately infected and killed by the new coronavirus, and now have among the lowest vaccination rates in the country.

Perhaps that’s why so many public-health experts were disquieted when, on May 13, the CDC announced that fully vaccinated Americans no longer needed to wear masks in most indoor places. “The move today was really to talk about individuals and what individuals are safe doing,” Rochelle Walensky, the agency’s director, told PBS NewsHour . “We really want to empower people to take this responsibility into their own hands.” Walensky later used similar language on Twitter : “Your health is in your hands,” she wrote.

Framing one’s health as a matter of personal choice “is fundamentally against the very notion of public health,” Aparna Nair, a historian and an anthropologist of public health at the University of Oklahoma, told me. “For that to come from one of the most powerful voices in public health today … I was taken aback.” (The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.) It was especially surprising coming from a new administration. Donald Trump was a manifestation of America’s id—an unempathetic narcissist who talked about dominating the virus through personal strength while leaving states and citizens to fend for themselves. Joe Biden, by contrast, took COVID-19 seriously from the off, committed to ensuring an equitable pandemic response , and promised to invest $7.4 billion in strengthening America’s chronically underfunded public-health workforce . And yet, the same peal of individualism that rang in his predecessor’s words still echoes in his. “The rule is very simple: Get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do,” Biden said after the CDC announced its new guidance . “The choice is yours.”

From its founding, the United States has cultivated a national mythos around the capacity of individuals to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, ostensibly by their own merits. This particular strain of individualism, which valorizes independence and prizes personal freedom, transcends administrations. It has also repeatedly hamstrung America’s pandemic response. It explains why the U.S. focused so intensely on preserving its hospital capacity instead of on measures that would have saved people from even needing a hospital. It explains why so many Americans refused to act for the collective good, whether by masking up or isolating themselves. And it explains why the CDC, despite being the nation’s top public-health agency, issued guidelines that focused on the freedoms that vaccinated people might enjoy. The move signaled to people with the newfound privilege of immunity that they were liberated from the pandemic’s collective problem. It also hinted to those who were still vulnerable that their challenges are now theirs alone and, worse still, that their lingering risk was somehow their fault. (“If you’re not vaccinated, that, again, is taking your responsibility for your own health into your own hands,” Walensky said .)

Neither is true. About half of Americans have yet to receive a single vaccine dose; for many of them, lack of access, not hesitancy, is the problem. The pandemic, meanwhile, is still just that—a pan demic, which is raging furiously around much of the world, and which still threatens large swaths of highly vaccinated countries, including some of their most vulnerable citizens. It is still a collective problem, whether or not Americans are willing to treat it as such.

Individualism can be costly in a pandemic. It represents one end of a cultural spectrum with collectivism at the other—independence versus interdependence, “me first” versus “we first.” These qualities can be measured by surveying attitudes in a particular community, or by assessing factors such as the proportion of people who live, work, or commute alone. Two studies found that more strongly individualistic countries tended to rack up more COVID-19 cases and deaths. A third suggested that more individualistic people (from the U.S., U.K, and other nations) were less likely to practice social distancing. A fourth showed that mask wearing was more common in more collectivist countries, U.S. states, and U.S. counties—a trend that held after accounting for factors including political affiliation, wealth, and the pandemic’s severity. These correlative studies all have limitations, but across them, a consistent pattern emerges—one supported by a closer look at the U.S. response.

“From the very beginning, I’ve thought that the way we’ve dealt with the pandemic reflects our narrow focus on the individual,” Camara Jones, a social epidemiologist at Morehouse School of Medicine, told me. Testing, for instance, relied on slow PCR-based tests to diagnose COVID-19 in individual patients. This approach makes intuitive sense—if you’re sick, you need to know why—but it cannot address the problem of “where the virus actually is in the population, and how to stop it,” Jones said. Instead, the U.S. could have widely distributed rapid antigen tests so that people could regularly screen themselves irrespective of symptoms, catch infections early, and isolate themselves when they were still contagious. Several sports leagues successfully used rapid tests in exactly this way, but they were never broadly deployed, despite months of pleading from experts .

The U.S. also largely ignored other measures that could have protected entire communities, such as better ventilation, high-filtration masks for essential workers, free accommodation for people who needed to isolate themselves, and sick-pay policies. As the country focused single-mindedly on a vaccine endgame, and Operation Warp Speed sped ahead, collective protections were left in the dust. And as vaccines were developed, the primary measure of their success was whether they prevented symptomatic disease in individuals.

Vaccines, of course, can be a collective solution to infectious disease, especially if enough people are immune that outbreaks end on their own. And even if the U.S. does not achieve herd immunity , vaccines will offer a measure of collective protection. As well as preventing infections—severe and mild, symptomatic and asymptomatic, vanilla and variant—they also clearly make people less likely to spread the virus to one another. In the rare event that fully vaccinated people get breakthrough infections , these tend to be milder and shorter ( as recently seen among the New York Yankees ); they also involve lower viral loads. “The available evidence strongly suggests that vaccines decrease the transmission potential of vaccine recipients who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 by at least half,” wrote three researchers in a recent review . Another team estimated that a single dose of Moderna’s vaccine “reduces the potential for transmission by at least 61 percent, possibly considerably more.”

Even if people get their shots purely to protect themselves, they also indirectly protect their communities. In Israel and the U.S. , rising proportions of immunized adults led to plummeting case numbers among children, even though the latter are too young to be vaccinated themselves. “For people who do not get vaccinated and remain vulnerable, their risk is still greatly reduced by the immunity around them,” Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, told me.

There’s a catch, though. Unvaccinated people are not randomly distributed. They tend to cluster together, socially and geographically, enabling the emergence of localized COVID-19 outbreaks. Partly, these clusters exist because vaccine skepticism grows within cultural and political divides, and spreads through social networks. But they also exist because decades of systemic racism have pushed communities of color into poor neighborhoods and low-paying jobs, making it harder for them to access health care in general, and now vaccines in particular .

“This rhetoric of personal responsibility seems to be tied to the notion that everyone in America who wants to be vaccinated can get a vaccine: You walk to your nearest Walgreens and get your shot,” Gavin Yamey, a global-health expert at Duke, told me. “The reality is very different.” People who live in poor communities might not be near vaccination sites, or have transportation options for reaching one. Those working in hourly jobs might be unable to take time off to visit a clinic, or to recover from side effects. Those who lack internet access or regular health-care providers might struggle to schedule appointments. Predictably, the new pockets of immune vulnerability map onto old pockets of social vulnerability.

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey , a third of unvaccinated Hispanic adults want a vaccine as soon as possible—twice the proportion of unvaccinated whites. But 52 percent of this eager group were worried that they might need to miss work because of the reputed side effects, and 43 percent feared that getting vaccinated could jeopardize their immigration status or their families’. Unsurprisingly then, among the states that track racial data for vaccinations, just 32 percent of Hispanic Americans had received at least one dose by May 24, compared with 43 percent of white people. The proportion of at least partly vaccinated Black people was lower still, at 29 percent. And as Lola Fadulu and Dan Keating reported in The Washington Post , Black people now account for 82 percent of COVID-19 cases in Washington, D.C., up from 46 percent at the end of last year. The vaccines have begun to quench the pandemic inferno, but the remaining flames are still burning through the same communities that have already been disproportionately scorched by COVID-19 —and by a much older legacy of poor health care.

For unvaccinated people, the pandemic’s collective problem not only persists , but could deepen. “We’re entering a time when younger children are going to be the biggest unvaccinated population around,” Lessler told me. Overall, children are unlikely to have severe infections, but that low individual risk is still heightened by social factors; it is telling that more than 75 percent of the children who have died from COVID-19 were Black, Hispanic, or Native American. And when schools reopen for in-person classes, children can still spread the virus to their families and communities . “Schools play this fairly unique role in life,” Lessler said. “They’re places where a lot of communities get connected up, and they give the virus the ability, even if there’s not much transmission happening, to make its way from one pocket of unvaccinated people to another.”

Schools aren’t helpless. Lessler has shown that they can reduce the risk of seeding community outbreaks by combining several protective measures, such as regular symptom screenings and masks for teachers, tying their use to community incidence. But he worries that schools might instead pull back on such measures, whether in reaction to the CDC’s new guidance or because of complacency about an apparently waning pandemic. He worries, too, that complacency may be commonplace. Yes, vaccines substantially lower the odds that people will spread the virus, but those nonzero odds will creep upward if other protective measures are widely abandoned. The onset of cooler weather in the fall might increase them further. So might the arrival of new variants.

The Alpha variant of the new coronavirus (B.1.1.7, now the most common U.S. lineage) can already spread more easily than the original virus. The Delta variant (B.1.617.2, which has raised concerns after becoming dominant in the U.K. and India) could be more transmissible still . An assessment from the U.K. suggests that a single vaccine dose is less protective against Delta than its predecessors, although two doses are still largely effective . For now, vaccines are still beating the variants. But the variants are pummeling the unvaccinated.

“My biggest concern is that those who are unvaccinated will have a false sense of safety and security as cases drop this summer,” says Joseph Allen, who directs Harvard’s Healthy Buildings program. “It might feel like the threat has fully diminished if this is in the news less often, but if you’re unvaccinated and you catch this virus, your risk is still high.” Or perhaps higher: In the U.S., unvaccinated people might be less likely to encounter someone infectious. But on each such encounter , their odds of catching COVID-19 are now greater than they were last year.

When leaders signal to vaccinated people that they can tap out of the collective problem, that problem is shunted onto a smaller and already overlooked swath of society. And they do so myopically. The longer rich societies ignore the vulnerable among them, and the longer rich nations neglect countries that have barely begun to vaccinate their citizens, the more chances SARS-CoV-2 has to evolve into variants that spread even faster than Delta, or—the worst-case scenario—that finally smash through the vaccines’ protection. The virus thrives on time. “The longer we allow the pandemic to rage, the less protected we’ll be,” Morehouse’s Camara Jones says. “I think we’re being a bit smug about how well protected we are.”

Ian Mackay, a virologist at the University of Queensland, famously imagined pandemic defenses as layers of Swiss cheese . Each layer has holes, but when combined, they can block a virus. In Mackay’s model, vaccines were the last layer of many. But the U.S. has prematurely stripped the others away, including many of the most effective ones. A virus can evolve around a vaccine, but it cannot evolve to teleport across open spaces or punch its way through a mask. And yet, the country is going all in on vaccines, even though 48 percent of Americans still haven’t had their first dose, and despite the possibility that it might fall short of herd immunity . Instead of asking, “How do we end the pandemic?” it seems to be asking, “What level of risk can we tolerate?” Or perhaps, “Who gets to tolerate that risk?”

Consider what happened in May, after the CDC announced that fully vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks in most indoor places. Almost immediately, several states lifted their mask mandate. At least 24 have now done so , as have many retailers including Walmart, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and Costco, which now rely on the honor system. The speed of these changes was surprising. When The New York Times surveyed 570 epidemiologists a few weeks before the announcement, 95 percent of them predicted that Americans would need to continue wearing masks indoors for at least half a year.

Some public-health experts have defended the CDC’s new guidance, for at least four reasons. They say that the CDC correctly followed the science, that its new rules allow for more flexibility , that it correctly read the pulse of a fatigued nation, and that it may have encouraged vaccination (although Walensky has denied that this was the CDC’s intention). In sum, vaccinated people should know that they are safe, and act accordingly. By contrast, others feel that the CDC abrogated one of its primary responsibilities: to coordinate safety across the entire population .

In the strictest sense, the CDC’s guidance is accurate; vaccinated people are very unlikely to be infected with COVID-19, even without a mask. “You can’t expect the CDC to not share their scientific assessment because the implications have problems,” Ashish Jha, who heads the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. “They have to share it.” Harvard’s Joseph Allen agrees, and notes that the agency clearly stated that unvaccinated people should continue wearing masks indoors. And having some flexibility is useful. “You can’t have 150 million people who are vaccinated and ready to get back to some semblance of what they’re used to, and not have this tension in the country,” he told me. The new guidelines also move the U.S. away from top-down mandates, recognizing that “decisions are rightly shifting to the local level and individual organizations,” Allen wrote in The Washington Post . If some organizations and states pulled their mask mandate too early, he told me, “that’s an issue not with the CDC but with how people are acting based on its guidance.”

It’s true, too, that the CDC is in a difficult position. It had emerged from a year of muzzling and interference from the Trump administration, and was operating in a climate of polarization and public fatigue. “When agencies are putting out recommendations that people aren’t following, that undermines their credibility,” Jha told me. “The CDC, as a public-health agency, must be sensitive to where the public is.” And by May, “there was a sense that mask mandates were starting to topple.”

But that problem—that collective behavior was starting to change against collective interest—shows the weaknesses of the CDC’s decisions. “Science doesn’t stand outside of society,” Cecília Tomori, an anthropologist and a public-health scholar at Johns Hopkins, told me. “You can’t just ‘focus on the science’ in the abstract,” and especially not when you’re a federal agency whose guidance has been heavily politicized from the get-go. In that context, it was evident that the new guidance “would send a cultural message that we don’t need masks anymore,” Tomori said. Anticipating those reactions “is squarely within the expertise of public health,” she added, and the CDC could have clarified how its guidelines should be implemented. It could have tied the lifting of mask mandates to specific levels of vaccination, or the arrival of worker protections . Absent that clarity, and with no way for businesses to even verify who is vaccinated, a mass demasking was inevitable. “If you’re blaming the public for not understanding the guidance— wow ,” Duke’s Gavin Yamey said. “If people have misunderstood your guidance, your guidance was poor and confusing.”

Meanwhile, the idea that the new guidance led to more vaccinations is likely wrong. “I’ve overseen close to 10,000 people being vaccinated, and I’ve yet to hear ‘I can take the mask off’ as a reason,” Theresa Chapple-McGruder, a local-health-department director, told me. Although visits to the site vaccines.gov spiked after the CDC’s announcement, actual vaccination rates increased only among children ages 12 to 15, who had become eligible the day before. Meanwhile, a KFF survey showed that 85 percent of unvaccinated adults felt that the new guidance didn’t change their vaccination plans. Only 10 percent said they were more likely to get vaccinated, while 4 percent said they were less likely. Vaccination rates are stuck on a plateau.

Creating incentives for vaccination is vital; treating the removal of an important protective measure as an incentive is folly. The latter implicitly supports the individualistic narrative that masks are oppressive burdens “that people need to get away from to get back to ‘normal,’” Rhea Boyd, a pediatrician and public-health advocate from the Bay Area, told me. In fact, they are an incredibly cheap, simple, and effective means of collective protection. “The pandemic made clear that the world is vulnerable to infectious disease and we should normalize the idea of precaution, as we see in other countries that have faced similar epidemics,” Boyd said. “But recommendations like this say, This is something we put behind us , rather than something we put in our back pocket.”

Collective action is not impossible for a highly individualistic country; after all, a majority of Americans used and supported masks. But such action erodes in the absence of leadership. In the U.S., only the federal government has the power and financial freedom to define and defend the collective good at the broad scales necessary to fight a pandemic. “Local public health depends on guidance from the federal level,” Chapple-McGruder said. “We don’t make local policies that fly in the face of national guidance.” Indeed, the CDC’s guidance prompted some local leaders to abandon sensible strategies: North Carolina’s governor had planned to lift COVID-19 restrictions after two-thirds of the state had been vaccinated, but did so the day after the CDC’s announcement, when only 41 percent had received their first dose. Meanwhile, Iowa and Texas joined Florida in preventing cities, counties, schools, or local institutions from issuing mask mandates. Rather than ushering in an era of flexibility, the CDC has arguably triggered a chain of buck-passing, wherein responsibility for one’s health is once again shunted all the way back to individuals. “Often, Let everyone decide for themselves is the easiest policy decision to make, but it’s a decision that facilitates spread of COVID in vulnerable communities,” Julia Raifman, a health-policy researcher at Boston University, told me.

The CDC’s own website lists the 10 essential public-health services —a set of foundational duties arranged in a colorful wheel. And at the center of that wheel, uniting and underpinning everything else, is equity —a commitment to “protect and promote the health of all people in all communities.” The CDC’s critics say that it has abandoned this central tenet of public health. Instead, its guidelines centered people who had the easiest and earliest access to vaccines, while overlooking the most vulnerable groups. These include immunocompromised people , for whom the shots may be less effective; essential workers , whose jobs place them in prolonged contact with others; and Black and Latino people, who are among the most likely to die of COVID-19 and the least likely to have been vaccinated.

During a pandemic, “someone taking all the personal responsibility in the world may still be affected by a lack of coordinated safety,” Raifman said. “They may be vaccinated but less protected because they are immunosuppressed and get the disease working in a grocery store amidst unmasked people. They may have a child who cannot be vaccinated, and miss work if that child gets COVID.” As Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, said on Twitter , “Don’t tell me it’s “safe”; tell me what level of death or disability you are implicitly choosing to accept.” When Rochelle Walensky said, “It’s safe for vaccinated people to take off their masks,” she was accurate, but left unaddressed other, deeper questions: How much additive burden is a country willing to foist upon people who already carry their disproportionate share? What is America’s goal—to end the pandemic, or to suppress it to a level where it mostly plagues communities that privileged individuals can ignore?

“When you’re facing an epidemic, the responsibility of public health is to protect everybody , but those made vulnerable first ,” Boyd, the pediatrician, told me. “If you have protection, the CDC is glad for you, but their role is not the same for you. Their role is to keep those most at risk of infection and death from exposure.”

America is especially prone to the allure of individualism. But that same temptation has swayed the entire public-health field throughout its history. The debate about the CDC’s guidance is just the latest step in a centuries-old dance to define the very causes of disease.

In the early 19th century, European researchers such as Louis-René Villermé and Rudolf Virchow correctly recognized that disease epidemics were tied to societal conditions like poverty, poor sanitation, squalid housing, and dangerous jobs. They understood that these factors explain why some people become sick and others don’t. But this perspective slowly receded as the 19th century gave way to the 20th.

During those decades, researchers confirmed that microscopic germs cause infectious diseases, that occupational exposures to certain chemicals can cause cancers, that vitamin deficiencies can lead to nutritional disorders like scurvy, and that genetic differences can lead to physical variations among people. “Here … was a world in which disease was caused by germs, carcinogens, vitamin deficiencies, and genes,” wrote the epidemiologist Anthony J. McMichael in his classic 1999 paper, “ Prisoners of the Proximate . ” Public health itself became more individualistic. Epidemiologists began to see health largely in terms of personal traits and exposures. They became focused on finding “risk factors” that make individuals more vulnerable to disease, as if the causes of sickness play out purely across the boundaries of a person’s skin.

“The fault is not in doing such studies, but in only doing such studies,” McMichael wrote. Liver cirrhosis, for example, is caused by alcohol, but a person’s drinking behavior is influenced by their culture, occupation, and exposure to advertising or peer pressure. The distribution of individual risk factors—the spread of germs, the availability of nutritious food, one’s exposure to carcinogens—is always profoundly shaped by cultural and historical forces, and by inequities of race and class. “Yet modern epidemiology has largely ignored these issues of wider context,” McMichael wrote.

“The field has moved forward since then,” Nancy Krieger, a social epidemiologist at Harvard told me. Epidemiology is rediscovering its social side, fueled by new generations of researchers who don’t come from traditional biomedical backgrounds. “When I started out in the mid-1980s, there were virtually no sessions [at academic conferences] about class, racism, and health in the U.S.” Krieger said. “Now they’re commonplace.” But these connections have yet to fully penetrate the wider zeitgeist, where they are still eclipsed by the rhetoric of personal choice: Eat better. Exercise more. Your health is in your hands.

This is the context in which today’s CDC operates, and against which its choices must be understood. The CDC represents a field that has only recently begun to rebalance itself after long being skewed toward individualism. And the CDC remains a public-health agency in one of the most individualistic countries in the world. Its mission exists in tension with its environment. Its choice to resist that tension or yield to it affects not only America’s fate, but also the soul of public health—what it is and what it stands for, whom it serves and whom it abandons.

The Atlantic ’s COVID-19 coverage is supported by grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

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