Everyday Disaster Ethics

This week, the WHO announced that it would cease to designate COVID-19 a “public health emergency of international concern,” affirming its status instead as an “established and ongoing health issue.” There is a distinction between the emergent and the established, the epidemic and the endemic, the disastrous and the everyday. Bioethics often traffics in disaster—in the…

The Road Not Taken: Thinking Beyond Vaccines

Tianyuan Huang// Truth be told, I did not see this coming. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I thought I would have been conducting dissertation research in Tokyo for nearly half a year by now; but I am still in New York City awaiting the lifting of travel bans, having already rescheduled flight tickets for the third…

Seasonal Time, Variant Time: Pandemic Futurity

Julia Dauer // Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have speculated about whether cases will ebb and flow in seasonal patterns.  Just this week, NPR released a podcast episode about the anticipated intersections of flu and COVID-19 in the U.S. this winter.  The episode encapsulates the collision between two conflicting ways of conceptualizing illness: seasonal time…

Ode on a Greek Letter

April Sharp // The fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet is currently in the spotlight, but for all the wrong reasons. On November 26th, 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) designated the SARS-CoV-2 variant B.1.1.529 as a variant of concern and gave it the label Omicron. The use of the Greek alphabet to label variants…

Collapsing Work-Life Balance in Covid-19

Amala Poli // The beep of the phone.. thudding heart, fingers clicking away. “Is everything okay?”  Yes, you say. “I just had to reply to this one email. All done now!” You set it aside, eyes flickering in the direction of the screen just a little.

Ri k’ak’a tzij: Kaqchikel Maya Neologisms in Response to COVID-19

Tiffany D. Creegan Miller, PhD // Though Guatemala is a relatively small country in northern Central America, it boasts of a robust multilingual and multicultural diversity. In addition to Spanish (the official language), Guatemala is also the home to 22 Maya languages, and two other Indigenous languages: Garífuna and Xinca. Within this ethnolinguistic landscape, Kaqchikel…

Notes on Grim

Emily Waples// Last week, we reached a point in this pandemic that has been some eighteen months in the making: more Americans have now died of COVID-19 than of the 1918-1919 flu. I’ve been dreading the moment less for the fact of it than for the fanfare, anticipating the precise terms in which I knew…