As Rhodes and Lancaster (2020: 177) highlight, ‘public health emergencies are rarely studied as they happen. But they should be’, and this is what we have tried to do: document what is happening at each stage of the evolving pandemic. Though ambitious in its design, we wanted to find out how this was affecting citizens globally to consider how the pandemic was – and still is – not only exacerbating neoliberalism's existing inequalities, but potentially reshaping society's political, economic and social institutions as well as our subjective outlooks. There was no time to wait for a funding call and continue along further bureaucratic pathways should project finance emerge. We are experienced researchers who were faced with a unique opportunity to research the most significant event so far of the 21st century and had to act quickly. Therefore, we wasted no time in devising our research tools and immediately set about our study.

Studying the ‘here and now’: the aims and methods of the Project

The aims of this study were to understand people's experiences of this unique global event and to chart how COVID-19 is reshaping social life and society. To do this, it adopted a flexible inductive approach which allocated different research methods to consider what we identify as three stages in the development of the pandemic. The initial stage examined the first lockdown experienced by over 100 countries. This was followed by the emergence of what was broadly termed by global entities – and in tandem with the World Health Organization (WHO) – as the ‘new normal’, where measures

such as self-isolation, social distancing and masks begin to dominate social life. As the ‘new normal’ was generally embraced or rejected, we then arguably entered a period of uncertainty marked by what many governmental scientists termed as the advent of the ‘second wave’. In some countries like the UK and US, commentators suggested this then became a ‘third wave’ and billions were invested in potential vaccines.

Given that there were significant limitations on where we could go as researchers due to the restrictions placed upon us, we had to be creative with the methods we employed (see Table 1).

Phase 1 documented the experience of the first ‘lockdown’ enacted in over 100 countries worldwide which, between January and May 2020, went into either partial, local or national lockdown.

When we reflect on COVID-19 and the lockdown restrictions enacted around the world, it is inevitable that some people will have experienced a ‘good lockdown’ in the way that some participants in the previous century's defining moments, the two world wars, spoke of enjoying a ‘good war’. Time to stop and reflect, identify priorities, learn a new skill, spend more time with family, work from home, enjoy Zoom quizzes. They will come out of this crisis financially better off, professionally secure and emotionally centred. For them, the world post-COVID-19 will likely be one of opportunity and advancement. However, the rich empirical data presented in this book show that these experiences speak to privileges not afforded to all. The world into which COVID-19 emerged was one of heightened inequality, increasing polarisation and tension, and a growing post-social arrangement whereby the challenge of social cohesion was fraught with difficulty. The pandemic has exacerbated many of these tensions and created new ones. New social divisions appear, and new fault lines represent challenges that will define the coming era. Social inequalities have grown, both economically and culturally, as some elites have enjoyed unprecedented growth in wealth, the ranks of unemployed in Western economies swell with each business failure and high-street closure. Elsewhere, in poorer developing nations, the pandemic has burdened states lacking adequate healthcare provisions and with considerable numbers of citizens that rely on the informal economy for work.

New global contours are emerging and the fundamental building blocks at the heart of social science are now questioned anew: how does the pandemic affect the relationship between individuals and society? What do new inequalities and fault lines mean for social cohesion? Will the pandemic usher in new configurations of social control? Rather than provide a summary of the main points made so far, this chapter will aim to draw together the threads of our argument to look towards the future, both for society and for the social sciences. We feel it is important to start asking the right questions and be willing to look for those answers.

It was quite surreal, looking back. The first whispers of a new and deadly disease emerging from Wuhan in China at the tail end of 2019 were easy to ignore. But as time passed and it became clear that we were witnessing a global pandemic, and that many all over the world would die, it was impossible to look away from the media as I struggled to get a handle on what it all meant. I remember very clearly the day Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, told us to return home and remain there. The rhythms of everyday life came immediately to an end. News of panic buying worried me slightly, as did the daily figure of Covid-related deaths. Like many people, I assume, my thoughts turned to my elderly mother and father. Older people, we were told, were the principal victims.

As time passed, I became more sceptical and returned to my role as a critical social scientist. But those first days will live long in my memory. We were living through a moment of profound importance, and for many people it quickly became clear that things would never be the same again. For some, things got easier. Billionaires quickly increased their already obscene wealth, and the professional middle classes have generally benefitted from working from home, rising property prices and the new expectation that everything can be delivered quickly to one's door. But for many others, things got a lot harder. Ethnic minorities appear to have disproportionately suffered Covid-related deaths. Those trapped in inadequate housing suffered greatly during lockdowns. Poorly paid service workers were revealed as an unacknowledged and underappreciated force upon which we all depend. Some were trapped in a confined space with an abusive partner. Reliance on alcohol appears to have increased. And our withdrawal from social life has exacerbated many existing problems while also creating new ones. Many illnesses have been left untreated as our national healthcare systems have been refocused on COVID or moved online. Before COVID struck, anxiety was already a corrosive and ubiquitous malady, and with lockdowns things got quickly worse.

From quite early in the crisis, it was possible to discern the gradual alteration of the global political economy.

As the previous chapter outlined, the most significant ‘event’ of the 21st century has the potential to drastically change the political, economic and social coordinates of the world. While some scholarship has been erudite, linking the micro to the macro and speculating on what the future political economy will look like (for example: Matthewman and Huppatz, 2020; Primrose et al, 2020; Saad-Filho, 2020; Scambler, 2020; Sumonja, 2020), other social scientific work is often theoretically and/or empirically absent. Although space constrains how much literature we were able to review, in our critical analysis of some of the work devoted to capturing, understanding and conceptualising how COVID-19 is affecting us and changing society, we suggest they fall into one of the following categories or, in some cases, a combination of studies/commentaries which:

• • Handwash social harm – endorse central ideological messaging associated with COVID-19 such as the lockdown and downplay the resultant social harm.

• • Represent empirical curfews – fail to step outside their discipline, romanticise reality and impose deaptive theories like moral panic. These works lack depth in capturing people's experiential realities during the pandemic and are often empirically limited.

• • Disinfect reality – do not place reality within its macro political-economic context and provide snapshot efforts to dissect social feeling/experience into measurable variables and graphs.

• • Reflect an academic lockdown – are not studies but commentaries alluding to the glorification of the author's hobby or previous publications.

In this chapter, we critically review these studies and commentaries. We question the worth of these contributions against the backdrop of the kind of world we described in Chapter 1 – which is swiftly becoming something much worse (Chapter 2). Why? Well because some social scientists appear to have failed to ask some of the most pressing questions raised by the inception of COVID-19 and its political management. For example, from what we can see there has been a dearth of analyses that challenge the political management of the virus or the overwhelming political and media consensus on lockdowns. Given that the life trajectory, transmission potential and possible mutations of COVID-19 are partially shaped by political interventions, we find this troubling.

If the social sciences were in a healthy state, scholars would be unrelentingly critical of what has occurred since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Viral pandemics are nothing new and throughout history have generated significant social distress and suffering. Perhaps the most devastating pandemic in recent history was the 1918 Spanish influenza, since it possessed a fatality rate of around 10% and killed over 40 million people worldwide. Thereafter, the 1968 Hong Kong flu also generated considerable social chaos across the globe, being associated with over one million fatalities. The 2009 swine flu pandemic lasted for nearly two years, and by comparison generated far fewer deaths than the Spanish influenza and Hong Kong flu, killing around 280,000 people. Yet since then, scientists have persistently warned about the potential for another global pandemic, in particular virologists, who claimed that climate change, global urbanisation and the interconnected nature of a globalised world could produce the right elements for rapid human-tohuman transmission should a virus emerge (Žižek, 2020). Such warnings, however, largely fell on deaf ears among the global political elite. Combined with neoliberalism's structural conditions outlined in the previous chapter, many nations were left radically underprepared for the outbreak of COVID-19 in December 2019.

Importantly, in the early period of 2020, the virus was spreading quickly, and generally the elderly or already vulnerable were dying at a fast rate. This set governments and the media into a frenzy as there was no known cure or remedy and no vaccine (Blakeley, 2020). Little was known about how the virus was transmitted and while large numbers of extremely sick patients were admitted to hospitals, some recovered quickly while others were unaffected by it. While some nation states locked down quickly, others such as the US played down the severity of the virus (Žižek, 2021). As we write, over three million people worldwide are known to have died from or with the virus. Therefore, it is important to weigh this against some of the arguments we provide in the book. We are not ‘COVID deniers’ – people who are sceptical about the existence of the virus. We know it exists. We know it is a threat to some people. We know it has caused immeasurable suffering among millions of families.

In the final days of 2019, reports emerged from Wuhan in China that a new strain of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19) had been detected. Within weeks it became apparent that asymptomatic human-to-human transmission was possible and that a major pandemic could be about to unfold. According to the World Health Organization (2021), by late April 2021, over 150 million people worldwide had been infected with COVID-19 and over 3.1 million deaths had been attributed to the disease. In the intervening period, day-to-day life changed so dramatically for people around the world that it is hardly controversial to suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic represents the most significant event since the Second World War. While the extent and nature of nation states’ responses to the pandemic have varied, most societies have undertaken social distancing measures; adopted the use of face coverings; imposed national lockdowns; and forced businesses to close, which collectively have had a considerable impact upon social life.

Nation states have been required to intervene in their respective economies on a scale that is without precedent in recent history through the offering of loans, tax relief and furlough schemes to cover a proportion of workers’ salaries. At the onset of the pandemic, supply chains failed, in the UK there were accusations of government corruption in the procurement of essential services, while surveillance technologies, such as test and trace apps, have proliferated and expanded. Workers – who were able to do so – have had to shift to online working and with the closure of schools, colleges and university campuses, so have many children and young people, positioning domestic dwellings as the epicentre of work, familial and social life for many. Debates surrounding responses to COVID-19 have become increasingly polarised over the course of the pandemic: anti-lockdown protests have taken place in several states, while some politicians and scientists have highlighted the various dangers of some of the measures taken to reduce transmission. Indeed, societal responses to the pandemic have engendered a range of unintended harms, such as reported increases in domestic violence, child abuse, unemployment, heightened anxiety, mental health problems and suicide, and have meant other life-threatening diseases have gone undiagnosed and untreated.

“Beloved, I Wish Above All Things That You May Prosper and Be In Health” The desire for others to enjoy good health reflected in the Apostle John’s wish for his friend Gaius is one that Christians have embraced since New Testament times. Christ instructed his disciples to “heal the sick … freely you have received; freely give.” The vast networks of religiously affiliated hospitals in countries across the globe exemplify one way Christians seek to follow this command.