Covid 19

"The Corona crisis and the Need for a Great Reset" is a guide for anyone who wants to understand how COVID-19 disrupted our social and economic systems, and what changes will be needed to create a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable world going forward. Thierry Malleret, founder of the Monthly Barometer, and Klaus Schwab, founder and executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, explore what the root causes of these crisis were, and why they lead to a need for a Great Reset.Theirs is a worrying, yet hopeful analysis. COVID-19 has created a great disruptive reset of our global social, economic, and political systems. But the power of human beings lies in being foresighted and having the ingenuity, at least to a certain extent, to take their destiny into their hands and to plan for a better future. This is the purpose of this book: to shake up and to show the deficiencies which were manifest in our global system, even before COVID broke out.

The emergence of COVID-19 has raised urgent and important questions about the role of Canadian intelligence and national security within a global health crisis. Some argue that the effects of COVID-19 on Canada represent an intelligence failure, or a failure of early warning. Others argue that the role of intelligence and national security in matters of health is--and should remain--limited. At the same time, traditional security threats have rapidly evolved, themselves impacted and influenced by the global pandemic. Stress Tested brings together leading experts to examine the role of Canada's national security and intelligence community in anticipating, responding to, and managing a global public welfare emergency. This interdisciplinary collection offers a clear-eyed view of successes, failures, and lessons learned in Canada's pandemic response. Addressing topics including supply chain disruptions, infrastructure security, the ethics of surveillance within the context of pandemic response, the threats and potential threats of digital misinformation and fringe beliefs, and the challenges of maintaining security and intelligence operations during an ongoing pandemic, Stress Tested is essential reading for anyone interested in the lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For two years the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the world. The physician and medical historian Jacalyn Duffin presents a global history of the virus, with a focus on Canada. Duffin describes the frightening appearance of the virus and its identification by scientists in China; subsequent outbreaks on cruise ships; the relentless spread to Europe, the Americas, Africa, and elsewhere; and the immediate attempts to confront it. COVID-19 next explores the scientific history of infections generally, and the discovery of coronaviruses in particular. Taking a broad approach, the book explains the advent of tests, treatments, and vaccines, as well as the practical politics behind interventions, including quarantines, barrier technologies, lockdowns, and social and financial supports. In concluding chapters Duffin analyzes the outcome of successive waves of COVID-19 infection around the world: the toll of human suffering, the successes and failures of control measures, vaccine rollouts, and grassroots opposition to governments’ attempts to limit the spread and mitigate social and economic damages. Closing with the fraught search for the origins of COVID-19, Duffin considers the implications of an “infodemic” and provides an cautionary outlook for the future.

Families left grieving; small businesses shuttered; communities in lockdown; precarious workers set adrift; health care workers stressed beyond endurance. The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world to its core. But the cracks already ran deep. Featuring essays on poverty, health care, incarceration, basic income, policing, Indigenous communities, and more, this anthology delivers a stinging rebuke of the pre-pandemic status quo and a stark exposé of the buried weaknesses in our social and political systems. As policy makers scramble to bail out corporations and preserve an unsustainable labour market, an even greater global catastrophe – in the form of ecological collapse, economic recession, and runaway inequality – looms large on the horizon. What can we do? From professors to poets, the authors of Sick of the System speak in one voice: We can turn our backs on “normal.” We can demand divestment, redistribution, and mutual aid. We can seize new forms of solidarity with both hands. As the world holds its breath, revolutionary ideas have an unprecedented chance to gain ground. There should be no going back.

The story of the pandemic is the story of women. This riveting narrative offers an account of COVID-19, reminding us of women's leadership and resilience, reflecting back hope and humanity as we all figure out a new normal, together. Throughout history, men have fought, lost, and led us through the world's defining crises. That all changed with COVID-19. In Canada, women's presence in the response to the pandemic has been notable. Women are our nurses, doctors, PSWs. Our cashiers, long-haulers, cooks. In Canada, women are leading the fast-paced search for a vaccine. They are leading our provinces and territories. At home, they are leading families through self-isolation, often bearing the responsibility for their physical and emotional health. They are figuring out what working from home looks like, and many of them are doing it while homeschooling their kids. Women crafted the blueprint for kindness during the pandemic, from sewing masks to kicking off international mutual-aid networks. And, perhaps not surprisingly, women have also suffered some of the biggest losses, bearing the brunt of our economic skydive. Through intimate portraits of Canadian women in diverse situations and fields, Women of the Pandemic is a gripping narrative record of the early months of COVID-19, a clear-eyed look at women's struggles, which highlights their creativity, perseverance, and resilience as they charted a new path forward during impossible times.

As Canada was in the grips of the worst pandemic in a century, Canadian media struggled to tell the story. Newsrooms, already run on threadbare budgets, struggled to make broader connections that could allow their audience to better understand what was really happening, and why. Politicians and public health officials were mostly given the benefit of the doubt that what they said was true and that they acted in good faith. This book documents each month of the first year of the pandemic and examines the issues that emerged, from racialized workers to residential care to policing. It demonstrates how politicians and uncritical media shaped the popular understanding of these issues and helped to justify the maintenance of a status quo that created the worst ravages of the crisis. Spin Doctors argues alternative ways in which Canadians should understand the big themes of the crisis and create the necessary knowledge to demand large-scale change.

Rated as a top 10 book about the COVID-19 pandemic by New Statesman: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2021/07/best-books-about-covid-19-pandemic EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC- ND It has been claimed that we are ‘all in it together’ and that the COVID-19 virus ‘does not discriminate’. This accessible, yet authoritative book dispels this myth of COVID-19 as an ‘equal opportunity’ disease, by showing how the pandemic is a syndemic of disease and inequality. Drawing on international data and accounts, it argues that the pandemic is unequal in three ways: it has killed unequally, been experienced unequally and will impoverish unequally. These inequalities are a political choice: with governments effectively choosing who lives and who dies, we need to learn from COVID-19 quickly to prevent growing inequality and to reduce health inequalities in the future. COVID-19 is an unequal pandemic.

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many thought the changes taking place would be fleeting. It is now widely recognized that COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic in our highly interconnected world, and “pandemic societies” will be with us for some time. Pandemic Societies brings together experts in a wide range of academic disciplines to reflect on how their fields might be transformed in this new context. While the pandemic forces global institutions, such as the World Health Organization, to reimagine the ways in which they function, it also reaches into our everyday lives to change how we organize culture, performing arts, sports, tourism, and cities. Exploring how COVID-19 has altered people’s daily experiences – the ways they meet to play, to perform, and to entertain themselves – this book also pulls the lens back to take in the broader institutional and political contexts in which these quotidian activities are carried out. Examining the profound ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed every aspect of our lives, Pandemic Societies attempts to understand how we might act to steer this pandemic society, and how to reinvent institutions and practices that we think of as intrinsically face to face.