Readings & Audiovisual

In parallel with the COVID-19 pandemic, an infodemic—an information epidemic—challenges human populations across the planet. Often framed as an enemy to be conquered, infodemics endanger public health because inaccurate or erroneous information spreads quickly on a large scale, triggers potentially harmful behaviours, and generates stress and anxiety. Much infodemics research privileges the investigation of online information creation and circulation, as well as measures to counter erroneous information. Less examined, however, are the offline effects of an infodemic. This chapter surveys how infodemic analysts have evaluated interactions between online information and offline practice. It examines studies focusing on the harmful content of the online informational ecosystem and containment efforts, and then explores social sciences contributions, which broadly identify factors contributing to public interpretation and offline practices. We conclude with a concrete example of an anthropological study exploring the interplay of online information and offline practice during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Healthcare workers are a priority target population in current COVID-19 vaccination strategies because of their increased workplace exposure and contacts with potentially at-risk patients.1 In some European countries such as Belgium, Greece, and France,2 COVID-19 vaccination is now required for this group. However, studies show that a varying but often substantial proportion of healthcare workers are hesitant about receiving these vaccinations.3 This is extremely relevant for vaccination campaigns, as healthcare workers are among the most trusted sources of vaccine information and have a direct influence on the vaccination decisions of their patients and social contacts.4 Furthermore, insufficient vaccination uptake risks increasing COVID-19 infections, most likely leading to more hospitalizations and less available health staff, increasing the workload in hospitals, and thus reducing health system capacities to adequately respond to the epidemic. Health professionals often do not voice their vaccine-related concerns, particularly to colleagues, due to the institutional and societal pressures to vaccinate. We may frame this phenomenon as unspoken vaccine hesitancy.

Vaccines are in the news every day as some countries struggle to improve vaccination rates and others struggle to access vaccines. A social science approach is needed to further explore what actions can be taken to optimize vaccine acceptance during a disease outbreak, with immediate lessons for the COVID-19 pandemic. Social science can highlight histories of oppression, political-economic contexts that exacerbate inequality, and how communities experience injustice with implications for how individuals view, trust, and take up vaccines. In this Epicast, we explore social science perspectives on vaccine deployment through the lens of Project AViD: Anthropological Exploration of Facilitators and Barriers to Vaccine Deployment and Administration During Disease Outbreaks.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how syndemics and protracted crises increase the vulnerability of communities facing concurrent, cascading risks and complex secondary events that aggravate health risks and underlying burdens of infectious and non-communicable diseases. Epidemics start and end in communities, where citizens are often the first to observe changes in the environment and in animal health, and the first to be exposed to new or re-emerging pathogens. Local stakeholders have crucial roles in the prevention and control of disease transmission, and frequently develop systems of appropriate health and social care based on local knowledge. However, current approaches to disaster risk management often do not sufficiently recognise and engage community expertise.

The COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to affect the human microbiome in infected and uninfected individuals, having a substantial impact on human health over the long term.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare stark differences in the effectiveness of public health responses across countries and communities. The United States has higher COVID-19 death rates than not only high-income peers such as Germany, Denmark, and Japan, but also lower-income countries such as Vietnam, Rwanda, and Uganda. This situation presents an opportunity to learn from global examples to improve pandemic responses, prepare for future health emergencies, and advance health equity.

The coronavirus pandemic has marked the most significant test of the way that the UK Government takes and acts on scientific advice in living memory. The scientific community—in academia, in the public sector and in industry—has risen to that challenge in extraordinary and, in many cases, unprecedented ways. This Report considers, specifically, the ways in which the Government has obtained and made use of scientific advice during the pandemic to date.

In January 2021, the WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that “we now face the real danger that even as vaccines bring hope to some, they become another brick in the wall of inequality between the world’s haves and have-nots” and that “the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure” because of this.

In this article, we focus on how the proxemics of the pandemic affect people with chronic conditions, including the impact of changed norms of engagement for self-care and chronic disease management for individuals and households. Among older people, COVID-19 can both directly and indirectly increase their isolation, load onto existing health problems, and add to the risks of depression and anxiety. While there is excess mortality among older people from COVID-19, the concomitant accumulating social and physical effects of changes to everyday lives may equally contribute to untimely death. With the spread of coronavirus, there has been growing concern for the vulnerability of older people to serious diseases for both biological and social reasons. Emerging data suggest that COVID-19 deaths and other acute conditions are increasingly unrelated to the virus itself, but born out of its social consequences (Delmas, Bouisset, and Lairez 2020; Manderson and Wahlberg 2020). There is concern regarding increasing suicides and (often interconnected) problems of gender-based violence and alcohol misuse (Al-Ali 2020; Gratz et al. 2020; Ramalho 2020; Troutman-Jordan and Kazemi 2020). The aptly named ‘broken heart syndrome’– stress cardiomyopathy or Takotsubo cardiomyopathy – is also reported to have increased since the start of the pandemic, with the primary risk factor being age, along with anxiety and/or depression (Alharthy et al. 2020; Giustino et al. 2020; Jabri et al. 2020; Sattar et al. 2020). Well into the pandemic, we now need to consider its continuing direct and indirect effects on people’s lives.

Community responses to the SARS-CoV-2, or “coronavirus” outbreaks of 2020 reveal a great deal about society. In the absence of government mandates, debates over issues such as mask mandates and social distancing activated conflicting moral beliefs, dividing communities. Policy scholars argue that such controversies represent fundamental frame conflicts, which arise from incommensurable worldviews, such as contested notions of “liberty” versus “equity”. This article investigates frames people constructed to make sense of coronavirus and how this affected social behavior in 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) arrived in the United Kingdom (UK) in February 2020, placing an unprecedented burden on the National Health Service (NHS). Literature from past epidemics and the COVID-19 pandemic underscores the importance of using a gender lens when considering policy, experiences, and impacts of the disease. Researchers are increasingly examining the experiences of healthcare workers (HCWs), yet there is a dearth of research considering how gender shapes HCWs’ personal experiences. As the majority of HCWs in the UK and worldwide are women, research that investigates gender and focuses on women’s experiences is urgently needed. We conducted an analysis of 41 qualitative interviews with HCWs in the British NHS during the first peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Spring of 2020. Our findings demonstrate that gender is significant when understanding the experiences of HCWs during COVID-19 as it illuminates ingrained inequalities and asymmetrical power relations, gendered organizational structures and norms, and individual gendered bodies that interact to shape experiences of healthcare workers. These findings point to important steps to improve gender equality, the wellbeing of healthcare workers, and the overall strength of the NHS.

Healthcare workers have emerged as a vulnerable population group during COVID-19, and securing supply chains of personal protective equipment (PPE) has been identified as a critical issue to protect healthcare workers and to prevent health system overwhelm. While securing PPE is a complex logistical challenge facing many countries, it is vital to recognise the social and health systems issues that structure the differential degrees of risk faced by various subgroups of healthcare workers. As an illustrative case study, the author identifies two key social factors that are likely to face the degrees of risk faced by midwives in the Special Region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, if and when COVID-19 takes hold in Indonesia. Healthcare workers in both high and low resource-settings globally are likely to face particular risks and vulnerabilities that are shaped by localized social and health systems factors. Qualitative social and health systems research can and should be utilized proactively in order to protect healthcare workers, to inform more equitable program design, and to create a foundation for health equity within the future of global health that emerges from the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been unprecedented for the amount of data which is produced daily about the disease and for controversies over evidence, predictions and ‘misinformation’.

MedLife Conference, one of the most important scientific events in CEE, brings together annually dozens of high-caliber speakers from Europe, Asia or United States and thousands of doctors from different specialties.

How do we socially and culturally adapt to isolation? How do we experience empty spaces? Are new forms of solidarity emerging? How does it feel to have to work in hospitals, assembly lines or shops when others stay at home? What new questions are we asking ourselves about our parenting and being a child? What new forms of exploitation emerge from the increased digitalisation of work? What new spaces of freedom have emerged? How can we understand social media’s role in the pandemic? How are our modes of communication changing in general? What role does humour play in our new shared experience of an absurd situation without precedent? Seven diarists offer us a short audio diary once a week throughout the month of April, reflecting, describing, venting – all is permissible, all has to be expected.

On 15 October 2020, the WHO Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health held a special meeting with the WHO Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals to discuss behavioural considerations in relation to COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and uptake. The discussion focused on a series of key questions around achieving high and equitable uptake of vaccines through evidence-based and behaviourally informed strategies.

Sonar-Global has organised 3 webinars addressing various COVID-19 topics in English & French. If you missed it, you can view the recorded versions and download the speakers slides.

Epicast is a podcast series about epidemics from Sonar-Global. The aim of this podcast is to explore the social dimensions of infectious diseases outbreaks so that we can get better at controlling them. For this first episode, we will be focusing on the Coronavirus outbreak.

My name is Maria Doria, I am a psychologist based currently in Uruguay. We are living a serious and sad moment, with a strong human, social and economic impact. Clearly, this global pandemic revealed that the world was not prepared on many levels for an event of this magnitude.

The World Health Organisation has warned that lifting lockdowns too soon could spark a dangerous resurgence of the disease. We hear how the progress made globally could be squandered if societies reopen too soon, and about the need for global cooperation.