Examining covid 19

“The twenty-first century has brought the end of geography.” This argument has occasionally appeared in the popular media over the past few decades. The argument goes something like this: Advanced transportation and logistics systems move products ever more rapidly across the earth’s surface. Almost anyone in the world is now just a high-speed internet connection away. Overnight shipping and social media have made distance obsolete. Furthermore, it is argued that global corporate marketing machines are quickly homogenizing consumer tastes. Shopping streetscapes are being standardized. You can now find the same fast-food restaurants and retail chain stores across the world. Everywhere is becoming the same. Geography is dead. Geographers vehemently reject this argument . . . because everywhere is not becoming the same! Geography (as location, as territory, as place) makes a difference in how all sorts of social, cultural, economic, and political processes play out! Geography is certainly not dead! The Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic of 2020 (and 2021 and 2022) provides a poignant example of the importance of geography. Geography has been front and center in the pandemic. Its spread involves the simplest of geographic concepts: distance. Efforts to slow and stop the spread of the virus have varied across space, with different territorial jurisdictions taking different approaches. And the consequences of the pandemic (infection rates, death tolls, economic slowdowns) have varied place to place. The importance of geography is evident even in the rollout and distribution of the vaccines . . . and in the phenomenon of ‘vaccine hesitancy’. As we learned in Chapter 1 / Assignment 1, geographic scale is a central concept in Geography. Geographic scale – also called spatial scale – refers to the areal extent of space under examination. I’d like you to write a short two-page paper about the Covid-19 pandemic that uses geographic scale as its organizing framework! You will write about the pandemic at four different scales – at four different areal extents of space! You will start at a very small scale of analysis – the personal scale of our bodies – and then ‘zoom out’ from there! I don’t want you to fret about how to organize your paper. Four paragraphs will suffice: First Paragraph: Start with discussing the coronavirus at the personal scale – at the areal extent of our individual bodies. How did you handle social distancing? Any situations (with strangers . . . or family) that made you uncomfortable during the pandemic? Has the pandemic permanently changed the extent of your own personal space ‘bubble’? Personal space involves personal experience . . . so I’m leaving this wide open! Second Paragraph: Discuss changes that the coronavirus brought at the community scale – at the areal extent of individual neighborhoods/towns/cities. I realize that it has been a few years since the big pandemic ‘shutdown’ . . . but the shutdown back in 2020 left a big impression on everyone – even on kids! Did it become a ‘ghost town’ in your community during the height of the pandemic in 2020? Were there any particular sights that really shocked you? (For me, it was seeing the mall in Fairview Heights completely empty.) Did any businesses in your community permanently go out of business? Third Paragraph: Discuss how the pandemic has played out at the national scale – at the areal extent of individual countries. The virus has been more devastating in some countries than in others. Which countries have been relatively successful at fighting the virus? Were there any particular reasons why they were successful? How has the United States done? Fourth Paragraph: This epidemic quickly turned into a full-blown pandemic. Discuss the impact of the coronavirus at the global scale. How was the original virus able to spread across the world so quickly? If another coronavirus were to emerge in the future, do you think it would spread across the world just as quickly?