Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Canada went into lockdown on March 19, 2020, announcing wide economic and financial support programs. Only essential services were open; the streets were empty. Phased reopenings began in late April 2020, but cases began rising as predicted when autumn brought people indoors. On January 14, 2021, when the death toll worldwide passed two million, more than 689,000 Canadians had been infected with SARS-Cov-2, and Canada ranked fifty-third in worldwide COVID mortalities, with 17,500 deaths in a population of nearly thirty-eight million. Provincial medical officers of health determine when infection rates warrant limitations to the operation of businesses, schools, restaurants, bars, and gyms. In Toronto, racialized groups have higher rates; in Alberta, meatpacking plants with a large migrant workforce were most heavily affected. Indigenous communities with poor infrastructure and overcrowded housing have been particularly vulnerable. The Atlantic East Coast, with a population of 2.44 million people, has been relatively spared, with eighty-one deaths to date. In Nova Scotia, where I live, sixty-five people have died, mostly seniors living in long-term and residential care facilities. The national disgrace is that some 80 percent of all COVID-19 deaths have been among elderly Canadians in congregate residential care. Conditions in those facilities got so bad that the army was called in to assist with their day-to-day operations. Quebec, Alberta, and Ontario have had much higher rates of COVID and less success in tracing community infections. Almost all infections in the East Coast area are related to travel from other provinces. An “Atlantic bubble” created on July 3, 2020, requires travelers to socially isolate for two weeks upon arrival. Air, train, and bus transportation have significantly declined in this region. Used to traveling for work and pleasure, I mostly explored my neighborhood and went hiking within an hour's drive. My family is 1,500 km away, outside the Atlantic bubble. I saw them in the early fall and had to quarantine for two weeks when I returned home. Those fortunate to be employed full-time, for example, by government and universities, work from home. Office buildings sit empty, replaced by countless Zoom meetings. Stores and service work continue, with mandatory masking, social distancing, and crowd avoidance rules. Household gatherings are currently restricted from five to ten people within the same social bubble, depending on the region. A few US-inspired protests for individual “freedoms” occurred in the West and Ontario, but public health practices remain respected by most. I make daily excursions outside to walk, hike, row, and now cross-country ski with friends. As a medical anthropologist studying vaccine development, work has been endless; rapid-research funding calls, working-group meetings, webinars, writing, analyzing, trying to stay current while a ship is being built at sea. What we thought yesterday is incorrect today. An emerging cadre of experts is designing the new normal that will prepare us for future pandemics. Forty years of market fundamentalism have fractured, hollowed out, and privatized public health worldwide. Governments abandoned their commitment to pandemic preparedness after the first SARS pandemic in 2002–2004. They ignored the International Health Regulations that 192 member states agreed upon in 2005 “to prevent, protect against, control, and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks and that avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade.” Unfettered capitalism, including the climate change it has wrought, created the tinder that COVID has ignited. Anthropology provides the conceptual tools and real-world evidence to engage locally with the complex biological, historical, social, and economic elements of a global pandemic. Structural conditions and community cultural values differentiate between health systems that protect or neglect. Worldwide, anthropologists are being deployed to engage with communities in the broadest sense across expert and civil societies in correcting the pervasive structural, social, biological, and economic inequities; such has always been the work of anthropologists. SARS-Cov-2 is not an equal-opportunity disease. Emergent anthropological approaches are best suited to recognize these holes in existing structures and through applying meaningful local ecological knowledges, to build post-pandemic paths forward.

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