Life Interrupted: COVID lockdown and Black Lives Matter
I was recently one of three middle-aged students to attend an outdoors, socially distanced yoga class in the countryside near my home in Somerset. We set out our mats and before the class started, the teacher, a white woman, asked...
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Pandemics and Colonial Indifference
Seeking perspective for our misleadingly named ‘unprecedented times,’ I re-read Albert Camus’ The Plague. Themes in the storyline of complacency, escapism, resignation, fear, heroism, altruism, heightened awareness of nature and death are reflected in the novel’s mainly male characters. The...
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Lay epidemiology and COVID-19
Was the COVID-19 virus moving around the world in late 2019? And did we actually already have that information, but lacked the collective framework to make lay epidemiology coherent? In terms of seeding and propagating the COVID-19 virus within the...
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Tenacious hope
With widespread lock-down measures to counteract the spread of COVID-19 infection, the possibility of the world under a radically changed order proved fascinating. Despite the suffering of the pandemic, were we getting glimpses of a better world? Unpolluted city vistas,...
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British inequality: It’s time to trust hungry people
Carl Walker and colleagues make the case for food poverty as a public health emergency and call for concerted response from govt to inequalities only made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Public fundraising for the NHS, and its discomforts
The fundraising of Captain Tom Moore and many others during the coronavirus outbreak has propelled charitable giving to the NHS into the public eye. At the time of writing, NHS Charities Together had raised over £100 million for its emergency...
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Pick a number, any number…
In the run-up to the 2019 general election, I wrote a piece about Boris Johnsons’ strategy for dealing with awkward interview questions. This outlined comment from Johnson himself, where he sketched his dead cat strategy. When faced with an impossible...
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The Whisper Network
On the 17th of March, 5 days after Denmark announced its official COVID lockdown, I received a surreptitious Facebook message from a Danish friend. ‘I’ve heard around they are going to make a full ban of going out of your...
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The Everyday Stuff of Covid-19: new and old normals
Hibs scored. The group of young men queuing with me just ahead of half time for the obligatory pie threw their arms around each other. They bounced up and down chanting Hi-bees, Hi-bees, Hi-bees. The vortex of celebration pulled me...
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Health Inequalities and COVID-19
Health Inequalities matter: why the poor and disadvantaged are more likely to die of COVID Anxious politicians want to make the case that COVID doesn’t discriminate, in order to frame the fatalities as effecting us equally rather than being due...
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Disposable humans?
A response to the recent social commentary on the perceived value of individuals with ‘underlying health conditions’ The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the fabric of society and has left many wondering about the social, political and economic structures that will...
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Critique, culture and crisis