Conclusion: Long COVID, long racism

Summary

Whether denied, derided or determined to overcome it, COVID-19 has impacted many lives in ways that we are only now beginning to witness, as we move from old configurations of normality and adapt to new realities, be it flexible ways of working and learning or working to change social systems. It is also evident that COVID-19 extends beyond a global health problem. Sociocultural readings of the pandemic have pointed to this as a crisis on multiple levels – economic, environmental, social, cultural and racial. It, then, becomes an important task to understand how this crisis has affected, and continues to affect, people across the world, through readings that do not lean into othering and moralism, as is often the main societal response, and as we have seen throughout this text.

With no end yet in sight, COVID-19 and its variants – from the South African variant to Omicron then to Omicron BA.4 to BA.5 – are still widespread and affecting the lives and health of many people. And amid the political and social turmoil of summer 2022, as the populace contends with strikes by railway workers and barristers, the cost of living crisis and the political turbulences of the British government, we must remember and be ever vigilant of the impact of the rampant racism evident in our society. In the early days of the pandemic, the COVID variants were not referred to by scientific nomenclature but by the site of origin – for example COVID-19's origins in China, then the South African strain, then the Indian strain. This associated racialisation of a virus was intriguing to observe, since it resurrected and reinforced the trope of dirty unclean foreigner/outsider/subaltern, and drew implicit links between biology and race. The naming of the variants by country of origin was eventually dropped in favour of scientific nomenclature. This may have occurred as someone, somewhere, realised that the links between the easy and lazy association of the new variant by country of origin could reinforce certain racial stereotypes. But the damage had already been done. So, while at the same time living with and suffering from the virus, Black and global majority people have suffered insulting microaggressions associated with the early identification of the COVID-19 virus variants, and simultaneously been lost to the virus in greater numbers. The saying ‘adding insult to injury’ jumps to mind.