When the early 2020 issue of the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, no one comprehended what the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, in Wuhan province, China, would mean to the world, to Europe, to any country or any single person in the weeks to come. A couple of months later, life as we knew it fundamentally changed.
Normal social life and
work has come to a halt. It seems the policing of populations might be the
‘only’ way to stop the deadly virus spreading further–or at least slow it down
to a pace our medical systems can handle. The effects of the pandemic
on social inequality, urban life, citizenship, migration, and core-periphery
relations are already becoming visible, but will be only fully comprehensible
in due course. What we have to face up to is unprecedented as far as contemporary
generations are concerned, and will leave heavy marks, stigma, and perhaps
trauma for those who survive the virus (but also for the lucky ones who are not
being physically infected).
There is a lot to say on
the neo-nationalisation of security regimes we see right now, as well as on
systematic failures of national and international politics in securing public
health systems, which now renders visible the horrific scale of death counting. Foremost, the rising numbers of mass deaths as result of the COVID-19 pandemic is inc(over-)crowded home spaces, and is reversing the notion of public social life and culture. Empty city streets, closed businesses, and people avoiding proximity of each other is a bleak reminder that our urbanist mode of living is fragile, and that everything does not come back.
Thinking of our current dependency on different social media platforms to continue our access to social communication in a time of ‘lockdown’ and ‘social distancing’, we should not forget that social media platforms such as Facebook are selling and gathering data. Thus, the lack of physical social interaction with family and friends, and our increased use of Facebook and Twitter, might be a haven for commercial (and political) information gathering right now.
COVID- 19 pandemic is indeed very detrimental in many ways. thereforewe must protect ourselves by preventing the transmission by taking steps that have been notified as above and following the policies made by the government so that this pandemic can be ended and all activities can be proceed as before
