Abstract
Decades of social science research have taught us much about how individuals, groups, and communities respond to disasters. The findings of this research have helped inform emergency management practices, including disaster preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of us—researchers or not—have attempted or are attempting to make sense of what is going on around us. In this article, we assert that we need not examine the pandemic in a vacuum; rather, we can draw upon scholarly and practical sources to inform our thinking about this 21st century catastrophe. The pandemic has provided an “unfortunate opportunity” to revisit what we know about disaster phenomena, including catastrophes, and to reconsider the findings of research from over the years. Drawing upon academic research, media sources, and our own observations, we focus on the U.S. and employ disaster characteristics framework of (1) etiology or origins; (2) physical damage characteristics; (3) disaster phases or cycles; (4) vulnerability; (5) community impacts; and (6) individual impacts to examine perspectives about the ways in which the ongoing pandemic is both similar and dissimilar to conceptualizations about the social dimensions of hazards and disasters. We find that the COVID-19 pandemic is not merely a disaster; rather, it is a catastrophe.
Highlights
As sociologists who specialize in disaster research, we have often been asked over the past year whether the pandemic is a disaster
Turning next to physical damage characteristics in Gill and Ritchie’s (2018) framework, most definitions of natural disasters include some aspect of loss of life, casualties, and damages to the built environment that are directly attributable to a specific hazard event
We have commented about the many ways in which the pandemic is a catastrophe that has overwhelmed the nation’s central government and response systems, as well as caused widespread social disruption and shed further light on vulnerable groups and systemic inequalities
Summary
As sociologists who specialize in disaster research, we have often been asked over the past year whether the pandemic is a disaster. As with much research in the hazard and disaster field, perspectives on these dimensions and comparisons have evolved over the past forty years and continue to do so. This framework is not intended to reify distinctions between natural and technological disasters. It suggests that natural and technological disasters have overlapping qualities, characteristics, and outcomes that should be considered on a continuum We apply this framework to examine the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. Since Hurricane Katrina, in particular, there is widespread consensus among scholars that there is no such thing as a “natural” disaster—that disasters of most kinds are fundamentally a consequence of systemic social inequality. While we do not dispute that disasters primarily have social roots, we maintain that there are differences between natural hazards and technological hazards
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