Sociological Analysis of Covid-19

Covid-19 struck us hard. The numbers tell only some of the story - number of cases, number of deaths, and many more statistics. These will be disputed, revised, and clarified, much like the rules deciding the Cricket World Cup 2019 final.  And just like that match led to a review of rules, the Covid-19 pandemic has to be thoroughly examined to make sense of the far-reaching implications it has had thus far.

Economic System

"The truth is we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless." - Woodrow Wilson.

The economic system has always been a subject of discussion. It has evolved over the course of history, and presently, neoliberal capitalist system in some countries coexists with the state taking the leading role in the economy in others.

Economist Jayati Ghosh sternly criticizes the neoliberal model. "The crisis has exposed the weakness, the fragility, the hollowness of neoliberal capitalism, the fact that it does not deliver basic services to the people, that it can unleash pandemics that not just create massive health hazards, but even destroy the workings of market economies and therefore destroy a lot of capital.", she says.^[1]
            Another natural fallout of neoliberal capitalism is Disaster Capitalism. Naomi Klein used the concept first in 2007. It describes the way private industries spring up to profit from large-scale crises directly.^[2] Imagine something to the tune of Salman Bhai releasing his movie Radhe on an OTT platform for Rs. 150 during the second wave! The ongoing vaccination drives further highlight this. Israel has achieved its spectacular vaccination rate by paying higher prices for the vaccines. The USA has followed suit. Even within the European Union, where a coordinated response and fair distribution of vaccines in proportion to member states’ populations was negotiated, it emerged that wealthier countries like Germany have managed to secure more vaccines for themselves.^[3] The spiraling price of oxygen cylinders, oxygen concentrators, drugs like Remdesivir etc., as covid cases mount up during the second wave in India, highlights the predatory nature of disaster capitalism further.^[4]

Spotlight has also fallen upon intensive capitalist agricultural production, which is a breeding ground for novel pathogens. Its reliance on domesticated monoculture also works against the existence of immunity, facilitating transmission.^[5] Increasing urban density allows such diseases to spread quickly, while labor migrations and global commodity circuits work as vectors that take them far from their place of origin.^[6]

This is perhaps neatly summed up by Ulrich Beck^[7] who suggests that we are now facing the unintended consequences of industrial modernity, that we can no longer predict or control the very threats that we have created. This becomes all the more relevant as the Wuhan Lab leak theory gains credibility. In 'risk society', we become radically dependent on specialized scientific knowledge to define what is and what is not dangerous before encountering the dangers themselves. We become, as Beck puts it, “incompetent in matters” of our “own affliction.” An example close to the home is the love triangle between Elon Musk, Cryptocurrencies and the speculators. The latter are dependent on Musk's tweets as far as their speculative investment in crypto is concerned.
        Alienated from our faculties of assessment, we lose an essential part of our “cognitive sovereignty.” We thus face a double shock: a threat to our health and survival and a threat to our autonomy in gauging those threats. As we react and struggle to reassert control, we have no option but to “become small, private alternative experts in risks of modernization.”^[8]

Political System

Covid-19 pandemic has brought out the shock doctrine in play. Naomi Klein gave the concept in her book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" in 2007.^[9] The “shock doctrine” is the political strategy of using large-scale crises to push through policies that systematically deepen inequality, enrich elites, and undercut everyone else. In moments of crisis, people tend to focus on the daily emergencies of surviving that crisis, whatever it is, and tend to put too much trust in those in power. We take our eyes off the ball a little bit in moments of crisis.
        In response to the coronavirus, Trump proposed a $700 billion stimulus package that would include cuts to payroll taxes (which would devastate Social Security) and provide assistance to industries that will lose business due to the pandemic. Klein says, “They are not doing this because they think it is the most effective way to alleviate suffering during a pandemic - they have these ideas lying around that they now see an opportunity to implement”.^[10] However, the gloom is not all there is to the pandemic.

Communitas is the coming together of people for other people to secure a world together. It refers to the improvisational social bonds and spontaneous mutual support that arises within communities when disaster strikes.^[11] Numerous studies across the subsequent century have come to the same conclusion: “disasters bring out prosocial and innovative behaviors in communities”.^[12] Captain America embodied the spirit of Communitas with the war cry of 'Avengers, assemble' in Avengers: Endgame.
        George Monbiot (2020) notes that we are also seeing the rise of people power the world over, from the young volunteers in Hyderabad who are provisioning the city’s precarious workers with food packages, to the  helpers in Wuhan who are ferrying essential medical workers between hospital and home, to the programmers in Latvia who organized a hackathon to create optimal face  shield components for 3D printers, to the student babysitting service in Prague, and those  groups internationally who are picking up medical supplies for the elderly. All over the world, communities have mobilized where governments have failed.’^[13]

Surveillance Society 

Michel Foucault used English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s 'Panopticon' as a metaphor to illustrate how modern social institutions like prisons, the mental asylums, schools, workhouses, and factories produced obedient citizens who comply with social norms, not simply under threat of corporal punishment, but as a result of their behavior being constantly sculpted to ensure they fully internalize the dominant beliefs and values.^[14] The twin notions of surveillance and self-regulation seem to have become more acceptable and then entrenched post-COVID-19.

In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, many standard surveillance techniques have been applied, including contact tracing, global seroprevalence studies, selective nasopharyngeal swabbing of cases, contacts, and the general population, and testing of blackwater for viral fragments. A multitude of smartphone apps have been devised to improve symptom tracking and contact tracing. Emergency powers have been widely enacted, and police, military, and government surveillance activities to ensure people comply with COVID-19 restrictions have been greatly extended.^[15]

It is hardly a point of contention that these powers will not entirely be rolled back. Edward Snowden, the man who exposed the breadth of NSA spying, has warned that an uptick in surveillance due to the coronavirus could lead to long-lasting effects on civil liberties.^[16]

Vulnerable Sections

Steve Matthewman is his 2015 book, noted that the isolated, weak, minorities, and the less wealthy consistently fare worse in disaster situations.^[17] In the case of COVID-19, exposure means that an individual comes in contact with or close to a person who is affected by COVID-19. Marginalized people are predisposed to work under conditions that disproportionately expose them to the virus. The poorly ventilated houses, crowded streets and public transport, and unequal access to sanitizers, clean water, and soaps puts marginalized and poor at a far greater risk. In the case of India, according to the 2011 census, almost 65.5 million people live in slums in India, where maintaining a ‘social’ distance is not feasible. Only 46.6% of the Indian population avail drinking water within the premises, implying that a large section of our population is compelled to utilize communal drinking facilities. Additionally, large parts of India face acute water scarcity in the summer months, which raises serious questions on the feasibility of handwashing practice.^[18]

Further, the Infection fatality rate (IFR) is correlated with age. The elderly are feeling coronavirus’ physical impacts the most.^[19] There is a prominent gender component too. Women globally make up over 70% of workers in health, including those working in care institutions. They are on the front line of the fight against COVID-19. As a result of the pandemic, they are facing a double burden: longer shifts at work, and additional care work at home.^[20]

In young children and adolescents, the pandemic and lockdown have a greater impact on emotional and social development than in grown-ups. Children experienced disturbed sleep, nightmares, poor appetite, agitation, inattention, and separation-related anxiety. The home confinement of children and adolescents is associated with uncertainty and anxiety attributable to disruption in their education, physical activities, and opportunities for socialization. Moreover, the underprivileged children face acute deprivation of nutrition and overall protection.^[21]

The pandemic is racialized. The coronavirus has brought with it an increase in anti-Asian rhetoric and reported hate crimes targeting Asian/Asian American people and businesses in the US. Similarly, Africans in parts of China and Muslims in parts of India have been accused of spreading the virus and subjected to discriminatory practices and violence. The use of terms like Chinese virus, Indian, and other variants fuels this.^[22]

Religion

Religion has been an important factor shaping the discourse around the Covid-19 pandemic. Religion as a whole suffered initially as lockdown ensued. Temples, churches, gurudwaras, etc. were closed, and congregations of various religious faiths were disallowed. A certain element of negative attitude towards religion fostered due to the gatherings like those of Tablighi Jamat,^[23] at Kumbh,^[24] and continued activities of monks and religious leaders^[25]. 

At the same time, various religious groups came forward to organize relief measures during the pandemic.^[26] For believers, one of the crucial functions of religion is in the realm of the therapeutic. They turn to religion in times of affliction and grief with marked intensity than at other times.^[27] Evidence exists to this end. Research using Gallup data conducted by researchers at MIT, Baylor, and Duke Universities shows that religious Americans were better able than those who were less religious to weather the economic storm of the 2008 recession, at least in terms of well-being^[28]. The same should hold for the Covid-19 pandemic, especially when seen in the light of this Gallup survey between March 28 and April 1, 2020 -  overall, 19% of Americans interviews said their faith or spirituality got better as a result of the crisis, while 3% say it got worse.^[29]

Religion in Post Covid world

To the extent that religious participation is habit-based, and interrupted by social distancing, it may facilitate the exit of some from active religious participation. So rather than a V-shaped pattern in religious participation after the easing of social distancing, returns to religious practice may well not reach their pre-pandemic levels^[30]. Coupling this with the findings in the previous paragraph, it seems that religion may become a more private affair among believers. While the numbers at Churches or temples may decline, the numbers of believers would not. Similar conclusion was drawn by Robert Bellah in his ‘New Religious Consciousness and the Crisis in Modernity, 1976', where he argued that dwindling numbers of attendees at Church do not show that the importance of religion has declined, rather its form of expression has changed.^[31]

This makes the observation of Victor Turner all the more relevant, "The secret of the survival of religion is that religion is not a cognitive system, a set of dogmas alone, it is a meaningful experience."^[32]

Family and Marriage

Lockdowns, and stay-at-home measures instituted to combat the spread of the virus, have forced many families and couples to live in much closer and continual contact than normally experienced. There are various impacts on families. For many, there is the loss of family members (with those losses often occurring in ways removed from family contact that are in this era unusual). For almost everyone, there are anxieties and other feelings related to such potential losses (Weingarten & Worthen, 2018). Combine this with the other problems (e.g., increased unemployment and financial vulnerability) that accompany the pandemic, dealing with loss and possible loss are ubiquitous (Walsh, 2019). Beyond such direct impacts of the virus, there are indirect effects.^[33]

Critical view treats the family as a tool to keep the people in check. Burdened by the need to provide for family, workers do not rebel, and female work is denied of its value as well. According to David Cooper in his ‘Death of Family, 1972’ – ‘It is an ideological conditioning device in an exploitative society’.^[34] He also says it denies individual freedom and is a hindrance in the development of individual’s self. Extending the idea to the present Covid-19 pandemic, concern for family's health has provided a congenial environment for unregulated surveillance measures, increase in the state's power with less space available for protests and agitations.

Marriage has also taken a beating. This is abundantly clear in the first major survey of family dynamics since the pandemic began, the American Family Survey (AFS), a recent nationally representative survey of 3,000 Americans sponsored by the Deseret News and Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy in connection with YouGov. Among adults ages 18 to 55, the AFS finds that 34% of married men and women report that the pandemic has increased stress in their marriage. Given the lockdown, not to mention dramatic increases in unemployment and economic insecurity in the wake of COVID, it’s no surprise that the American Family Survey also suggests the marriage rate is falling - and will keep falling in the near future.^[35]
            However, all is not bad. For many, especially those who did experience major financial hardship, this tumultuous year has caused them to turn towards, not away, from their spouse. And that may partly explain the remarkable finding that the share of married men and women ages 18-55 saying their marriage is in trouble declined from 40% in 2019 to 29% in 2020.^[36]

Unfortunatelty, the uncertainty brought by the COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to disrupt the efforts made so far to end child marriage, and could result in 13 million more girls forced into early marriages between 2020 and 2030 (UNFPA estimates). Evidence of an increase in child marriages is already emerging from places such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, and Nepal.^[37]

Globalization

Globalization has led to the spread of the disease owing to mobility channels such as air and ship travel. Restricted travel, mobility regulations, and lockdown of economies and trade limited, and in some cases halted, globalization to reduce the rapidly rising number of COVID-19 cases. However, this strategy has put pressure on the airline and shipping industries, resulting in loss of income, disruption of global trading, and decimation of the tourism industry. Furthermore, event cancellations have affected the economy and tourism of various countries. The consequential impact on the workforce, supply chain, and consumer behavior is observed as a cascading chain of events that has halted the global economy.^[38]

It is being suggested that Covid-19 will hasten a fracturing of the global economy along regional lines with competing blocs centered on China, the United States, and perhaps Europe.^[39] Public opinion about globalization may take another negative turn due to Covid-19. 

On the positive side, having seen the fallout of having supply chains heavily centralized in China., it is expected that dispersal is on the cards.^[40] Greater dispersion of supply chains could potentially allow countries that have lost their productive capacities to China in the past 15 years to recapture some of it slowly, and allow purely domestic firms to be more viable.^[41] The current situation also offers us hope for new ways of forming and sustaining solidarity across cultural backgrounds, faith traditions, political systems, and geographic borders.  This new, more positive transnational solidarity was showcased in the form of intercultural, transnational  ‘medical diplomacy’, where countries have been sending doctors, paramedics,  medicines, and medical equipment across borders to those countries hit most severely by the pandemic and that lacked certain medical expertise and supplies. ^[42]

Social Change

The pandemic has resulted in many people adapting to massive changes in life, from increased internet commerce activity to the job market. Social distancing has caused increased sales from large e-commerce companies such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Coupang. Online retailers in the US posted $861.12 billion in sales in 2020, an increase of 44% from the year before.^[43] The trend of home delivery orders has increased due to the pandemic, with indoor dining restaurants shutting down due to lockdown orders or low sales.^[44]  Education worldwide has increasingly shifted from physical attendance to video conferencing apps such as Zoom as lockdown measures have resulted in schools being forced to shut down.^[45] 

Apart from these, pandemic fatigue has led to new coping methods, which tend to have a negative effect on mental health. 

The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is the first pandemic in history in which technology and social media are being used on a massive scale to keep people safe, informed, productive, and connected. At the same time, the technology we rely on to keep connected and informed is enabling and amplifying an infodemic that continues to undermine the global response and jeopardizes measures to control the pandemic. An infodemic is too much information, including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak. It causes confusion and risk-taking behaviors that can harm health. It also leads to mistrust in health authorities and undermines the public health response.^[46]

The physical distancing measures put in place to ensure containment of the virus has led to a surge in the use of video chat platforms to connect with friends, family, and colleagues. Various workplaces have also shifted to such platforms. This overuse of virtual platforms of communication is causing zoom fatigue.
    During an in-person conversation, the brain focuses partly on the words being spoken, but it also derives additional meaning from dozens of non-verbal cues. These cues help paint a holistic picture of what is being conveyed and what is expected in response from the listener. Since humans evolved as social animals, perceiving these cues comes naturally to most of us, takes little conscious effort to parse, and can lay the groundwork for emotional intimacy. However, a typical video call impairs these innate abilities, and requires sustained and intense attention to words instead. Prolonged eye contact has become the strongest facial cue readily available, and it can feel threatening or overly intimate if held too long. Multi-person screens magnify this exhausting problem.^[47]

Doomscrolling is the act of spending an excessive amount of screen time devoted to the absorption of dystopian news.^[48] The act of doomscrolling can be attributed to the natural negativity bias people have when consuming information.^[49] It  may also be the result of an evolutionary mechanism where humans are “wired to screen for and anticipate danger”. Being scared, for example, puts us on high alert, which is useful in dangerous situations.^[50] However, prolonged scrolling may also lead to worsened mood and mental health as personal fears might seem heightened. It could lead to an increase in ruminative thinking and panic attacks. In the long term, doomscrolling can increase levels of cortisol and adrenaline, both of which are stress hormones. ^[51]

Clearly, the Covid-19 pandemic has been the Thanos of our reality - except that the snap of covid-19 is painfully long. However, this also provides us with a chance at course correction as the situation evolves real-time. Bit by bit, as scientific evidence mounts, we have been changing our response to the virus. This has indeed been the key to our evolutionary success.

Aristotle said, "It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light." The light is around the corner. Chelsea believed this, and they won the Champions League. We just have to stay cautious and optimistic. And together, we shall also prevail.