Care goes viral: care theory and research confront the global COVID-19 pandemic (original) (raw)

2020, International Journal of Care and Caring

The hidden truths about caring revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic As the COVID-19 novel coronavirus spread in late 2019, it quickly transformed from a local outbreak to a regional and then an international epidemic. Within three months, it became the global pandemic that many observers believe will irrevocably change the world and how we live in it. Among the most affected aspects of life will be how we organise and practise care and caring. Plagues and pandemics have long shaped human history (Curson, 2006), as we have now been reminded. Despite the many advances of modern medicine, the destructive patterns of disease and disruption that are evident throughout human history did not end in the past; indeed, over the past century, these have continued in many different outbreaks, with vast human consequences (Hunter, 2007). There was, for example, no vaccine with which to end either the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918-19 which caused 40-50 million deaths, or the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which first appeared in 1981 and has so far led to 25-35 million deaths and immeasurable human misery. Alongside these major pandemics were others more specific in their impact: polio, Asian flu (1957-58) and Hong Kong flu (1968-70). While, to date, the number of deaths from COVID-19 remains lower than those from HIV/AIDS and many other diseases, the social, political and economic impact of the current pandemic is, and seems likely to be, far greater. Over just six months, use of the word 'unprecedented' (in English) to describe the transformations arising from the contagion, and from attempts by governments to manage and contain its effects, has rapidly become a cliché. The perception of unprecedented social impact is heightened by the rapidity with which COVID-19 spread around the globe at a time in which social, economic and political conditions appeared to be ever more precarious. As it shifted from a virus carried by the relatively wealthy between countries, it also became more socially dispersed, impacting especially harshly on disadvantaged, socially marginalised and