Pandemic Ecologies of Care

The chapter involves dialogues with a more extensive set of interlocutors in reflecting on how health professionals largely passed along the burden of care to laypeople. Undertaking this task required remarkable forms of creativity and collaboration that expanded notions of care far beyond narrow biomedical definitions of prevention and treatment. The discussion advances through substantial quotes from laypeople, epidemiologists, farmworkers, firefighters and paramedics, students, intensive care unit and emergency room nurses and physicians that show how the pandemic was woven into the fine details of individual lives. Dominant stereotypes—that of the heroes celebrated by pot banging neighbors and of arrogant, distanced professionals—collapse as health professionals found themselves sinking into incommunicability, even as they attempted to impose biocommunicable authority on patients and lay populations.