Adviser's Note

Adviser’s Note

As I sit down to write, my upper left arm aches from the second Pfizer vaccination that I received yesterday. In two short weeks, I will once again be able to hug (vaccinated) friends, attend my daughter’s college graduation in May, travel to New York to visit my 92-year-old mother-in-law. These are the marvels of human contact and connectedness that were interrupted just over a year ago, when the World Health Organization declared that the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 had reached pandemic spread.

As I think backward, to all that has transpired to make a friendly hug a remarkable achievement, I am overwhelmed. So much human effort and expertise! And despite this Promethean feat, so much loss of life. As of today, 7 April 2021, the WHO reports that almost three million human beings have died across the globe from COVID-19 (surely an undercount). Despite the once-unthinkable rapidity of vaccination creation and distribution, thousands more continue to perish every day.

Accounting, as precisely as possible, for the sheer magnitude of lives lost has been an extraordinary achievement. When leaders in the United States failed to take the virus seriously and meddled with the federal agencies devoted to managing and monitoring the pandemic, Johns Hopkins University stepped in to do the essential work of counting on their COVID-19 Dashboard. We have followed the terrible loss of life around the world, with the reddest bubbles bleeding together to blur the familiar outline of the country with the most deaths: the United States. This grim exceptionalism is a national shame, painting in red the shocking disregard for the basic precepts of public health. In the face of presidential inaction and perfidy, one can’t but honor the knowledge, expertise, and exhaustive on-the-ground labor that makes this database possible.

In a pandemic, counting is essential. Counting has revealed who counts—and who does not. Dr. Shreya Kangovi, associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, calls on the resources of metaphor to express this injustice: “COVID is a funhouse mirror that is amplifying issues that have existed forever. People are not dying of COVID. They are dying of racism, of economic inequality and it is not going to stop with COVID.” [1] The work of scientists and researchers and healthcare workers provide the glaring numbers that show our collective failure to protect individuals who are elderly, impoverished, incarcerated, and those working poorly paid jobs— especially people of color. [2]

In quiet moments, many of us turn to the humanities and the expressive arts to find meaning in grief, to seek consolation, and to make vital connections across all that separates us. In this issue of the Health Humanities Journal, we read poems and essays that give voice to our fragility: individual experience expands, testifying to what so many have endured.

We cannot “unsee” what COVID times have revealed—nor should we. The past thirteen months have lit up the essential roles that science, research, medicine, and technology play in our lives; equally, the pandemic has affirmed our need for beauty, reflection, and memorialization. The health of our communities, and society as a whole, is bound up with the efforts of millions of people, from factory workers to artists to civil servants. With millions of shots delivered free of charge in a few short months, we see what good government can accomplish. There is more work to be done, in the fight for affordable healthcare, racial justice, and dignified living conditions for those in congregate care.

Perhaps we are changed as a people, ready to invest in the things that matter? The lovely works collected in this issue of the HHJ, the stunning achievement of the Johns Hopkins database, a summer of powerful protests against racist violence, the vaccine priming my immune system to resist the coronavirus: I concentrate on these, as hopeful portents of what human beings are capable of.

Jane F. Thrailkill

1. David Raths, “For Vulnerable Populations, ‘COVID Is a Funhouse Mirror Amplifying Issues That Have Existed Forever,’” Healthcare Innovation, April 13, 2020, https://www.hcinnovationgroup.com/population-health-management/socialdeterminants-of-health/article/21133730/for-vulnerable-populations-covid-is-afunhouse-mirror-amplifying-issues-that-have-existed-forever. 2. Daniel Young, “Black, Disabled, and Uncounted,” National Health Law Program,August 7, 2020, https://healthlaw.org/black-disabled-and-uncounted/.