Living the death of others: the disruption of death in the COVID-19 pandemic

Marcos Freire De Andrade Neves

doi:10.1590/s0104-71832021000100005

Abstract

Abstract On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization classified the COVID-19 emergency as a pandemic, a decision that was taken following the perception that the virus was both lethal and rapidly spreading. The role played by mortality and contagion in this pandemic narrative, thus, cannot be ignored. On the one hand, contagion acts as a transgressive category that is a main source of socio-political disruptions and a catalyst for new forms of sociality. On the other hand, the effectiveness and persuasiveness of mortality as a quantifiable reality overshadows death as lived experience, obfuscating a profound reorganisation of the ways death is managed and produced through the work of a whole professional segment. Hence, this article explores how the response to the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping death as lived experience by transgressing categories of existence and reorganising the conditions under which death is managed and produced.

Highlights

On 11 March 2020, during a media briefing at the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the organisation’s Director-General, shared his concerns regarding an increase of COVID-19 cases outside of China
This article explores the aftermath of a specific pandemic narrative that revolves around contagion and mortality as animating factors of a political economy of life and death
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, whereas contagion can be seen as a starting point, something that acts to spread and intensify outbreaks, and the control of which would eventually lead to the successful control of the pandemic itself, mortality rates suggest an endpoint of failure in the management of the pandemic

Summary

Introduction

On 11 March 2020, during a media briefing at the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the organisation’s Director-General, shared his concerns regarding an increase of COVID-19 cases outside of China. The persuasion of data and its effectiveness within administrative frameworks may end up suppressing the very realities they help to describe To examine this process, this article explores the aftermath of a specific pandemic narrative that revolves around contagion and mortality as animating factors of a political economy of life and death. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, whereas contagion can be seen as a starting point, something that acts to spread and intensify outbreaks, and the control of which would eventually lead to the successful control of the pandemic itself, mortality rates suggest an endpoint of failure in the management of the pandemic This common narrative, fails to consider that the individual deaths behind mortality rates are the starting point of a whole new chapter in this pandemic narrative, and that the way death itself used to be produced through rituals, technical procedures, and negotiations is being profoundly reorganised. While the pandemic has caused disruptions that led directly or indirectly to the death of many people, what follows when death itself is disrupted?

From death to mortality

Findings

Contagion as transgression