The Nation In The Time Of The Pandemic

Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential. In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.

This edited volume explores the media and political discourses during the COVID-19 crisis across thirteen nations. Despite warnings that a global pandemic was a matter of if rather than when, the virus caught governments worldwide unaware. The nature, extent and timespan of governmental responses varied significantly from country to country, but a number of features were common to all. The nation became the frame of reference used in an attempt to make sense of the crisis, to keep citizens united, to gain their trust, and to ensure compliance with unprecedented health mandates. With the same purpose, there was a recourse to ‘non-ideological’ values and narratives (sometimes abstract, sometimes political) that could be accepted by all stakeholders. The analyses evidence the perception of the fragility of liberal democracy, caused by too much political and media consensus, by too much political and media dissent and by the threat of populism. The wide-ranging scope and multi-perspective methodology of the analyses offered in this book are an essential reading for academics and students of Media Studies, Politics, Political Communication, and Discourse Analysis and their associated disciplines. Written in accessible language, this volume (full of insightful and at times surprising ideas) will be of interest for all those keen to understand the role of political and media discourse in the communication of the COVID-19 crisis and its wider implications for liberal democracies.

Timely text authored by leading political communication scholars on the effects of tCovid-19 on political communication. How governments, journalists, and the public communicate is of interest within the disciplines of political science, media studies, communication studies, and journalism.

Eminent CBC journalist Ian Hanomansing profiles the Canadian doctors who stepped up to guide the nation through its worst medical crisis in a century. Most medical doctors, are accustomed to living lives of quiet dedication far from the public eye. What is it like for conscientious professionals like them when a country panicked by pandemic is suddenly beating down their doors desperate for answers? One of the remarkable features of the Covid-19 pandemic is the strength and compassion of the previously low-profile doctors who took to the public stage to lead the bewildered nation through the pandemic, counteracting misinformation and articulating the most up-to-date medical advice on avoiding infection and reducing viral transmission. British Columbia’s Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry attracted international attention for her calm, empathetic and evidence-based approach. Ontario infectious disease specialists Dr. Zain Chagla and Dr. Sumon Chakrabati advocated passionately for effective measures within the South Asian community disproportionately affected by the virus. Dr. Lisa Barrett and her infectious disease colleagues at Dalhousie University lobbied to set up rapid testing in places like bars, sports centres and university campuses in order to detect those unwittingly spreading the virus and to provide an early warning of potential outbreaks. Hanomansing captures the perspective and insights of doctors from coast to coast who accepted roles as public advocates and advisors, exploring the impact of unaccustomed celebrity as well as the skepticism, resistance and even hostility that sometimes went as far as death threats from Covid-deniers. Few of the stories to come out of the pandemic are as inspiring as this one of the doctors, scientists and health officials who transcended their accustomed roles to become public symbols of trust and hope. As they prepare to return to their private careers, they respond to Hanomansing’s invitation to detail lessons learned and measures that need to be taken to improve the response to future deadly pandemics. All author royalties from sales of the book will go to UBC’s Centre for Health Education Scholarship.

COVID-19 is the most significant global crisis of any of our lifetimes. The numbers have been stupefying, whether of infection and mortality, the scale of public health measures, or the economic consequences of shutdown. Coronavirus Politics identifies key threads in the global comparative discussion that continue to shed light on COVID-19 and shape debates about what it means for scholarship in health and comparative politics. Editors Scott L. Greer, Elizabeth J. King, Elize Massard da Fonseca, and André Peralta-Santos bring together over 30 authors versed in politics and the health issues in order to understand the health policy decisions, the public health interventions, the social policy decisions, their interactions, and the reasons. The book’s coverage is global, with a wide range of key and exemplary countries, and contains a mixture of comparative, thematic, and templated country studies. All go beyond reporting and monitoring to develop explanations that draw on the authors' expertise while engaging in structured conversations across the book.

Democracy in crisis -- Pandemic resilience -- Federalism is an asset -- A transformed peace: an agenda for healing our social contract.

As the culminating volume in the DCP3 series, volume 9 will provide an overview of DCP3 findings and methods, a summary of messages and substantive lessons to be taken from DCP3, and a further discussion of cross-cutting and synthesizing topics across the first eight volumes. The introductory chapters (1-3) in this volume take as their starting point the elements of the Essential Packages presented in the overview chapters of each volume. First, the chapter on intersectoral policy priorities for health includes fiscal and intersectoral policies and assembles a subset of the population policies and applies strict criteria for a low-income setting in order to propose a "highest-priority" essential package. Second, the chapter on packages of care and delivery platforms for universal health coverage (UHC) includes health sector interventions, primarily clinical and public health services, and uses the same approach to propose a highest priority package of interventions and policies that meet similar criteria, provides cost estimates, and describes a pathway to UHC.