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Managing Risk during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Global Policies, Narratives and Practices

Online ISBN:
9781447365280
Print ISBN:
9781447365242
Publisher:
Policy Press
Book

Managing Risk during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Global Policies, Narratives and Practices

Andy Alaszewski
Andy Alaszewski
University of Kent
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Published online:
18 January 2024
Published in print:
9 May 2023
Online ISBN:
9781447365280
Print ISBN:
9781447365242
Publisher:
Policy Press

Abstract

In modern society, risk plays a key role in individual and collective decision making. It provides a way of predicting the future and accounting for mistakes in the past. In early 2020, the rapid spread of a highly infectious virus (SARS-CoV-2) that caused illness (COVID-19) especially among the elderly and other vulnerable individuals threatened to overwhelm health and social care services and cause widespread social and economic disruption. Policy makers sought to make sense of and manage the uncertainties of this new virus. Risk provided one way of doing this. It was a way of identifying the potential danger, identifying who was most exposed to it and what actions could be taken to mitigate it. As a technical tool to assist decision making, risk depends on using evidence from past events to predict future incidents. In the early stages of the pandemic, such evidence was lacking, so policy makers had to frame the new disease, and the ways they did this had fateful consequences. Risk is attractive to policy makers because it appears to provide a technical framework for decision making. However, it addresses the probability of different outcomes, and such outcomes not only have different values but can also impact in a range of ways on different groups in society. Risk assessments and the decisions based on them are underpinned by value judgements. In the pandemic, policy makers were reluctantly forced to make such judgements.

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