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COVID-19 Seminar #1: Professor Priscilla Wald, Duke University
Title: Contagion: COVID-19, the Outbreak Narrative, and Why We Need to Change the Story
Abstract: COVID-19 is the name of a pathogen—a disease-causing microbe—but if it is a “newly emerging infection,” it is also a newly emerging, though familiar, story: the latest version of “the outbreak narrative.” Accounts of newly surfacing diseases appeared in scientific publications and the mainstream media in the Global North with increasing frequency following the introduction of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the mid-1980s.
They put the vocabulary of disease outbreaks into circulation, and they introduced the concept of “emerging infections.” The repetition of particular phrases, images and story lines produced a formula that quickly became conventional as it formed the plot of the popular novels and films in the mid-1990s.
These stories have consequences. As they disseminate information, they affect survival rates and contagion routes. They promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, populations, spaces and locales (regional and global), behaviors and lifestyles, and they change economies. They also influence how both scientists and the lay public understand the nature and consequences of infection, how we imagine the threat and why we react so fearfully, and which problems merit our attention and resources.
