The spread of the coronavirus disease has led to global, crushing turning points, to an acceleration of the crisis of human lifestyle and social needs, relations, and production. It exposed the boundaries of a secure, social, geopolitical, technological, and industrial model. That moment radically turned the world upside down, and plunged it into chaos and instability, forcing it to reconsider the entrenched laws and principles. There are many guesses about its appearance, and there is still no single answer to this question. Certainly, COVID-19 is an urgent problem requiring adjusting existing common opinions, ideas, and knowledge, searching for guilt and salvation. The social side of the pandemic is different health indicators and cases of infection between different social groups depending on class, gender, race, and ethnicity. An urgent issue focusing on researchers’ attention is coronavirus’s experience, impact, and consequences on society.
What factors define a pandemic as a social risk, and how does it affect the mentality? Are there any special patterns in this, and what consequences can the virus lead to humanity? What are the theories and strategies for eliminating this issue? These are the key and important questions in this study. The purpose is a theoretical and practical understanding of the pandemic through the prism of sociological risk factors, its meaning, and nature using the tools of sociology. The study contains quantitative and qualitative research methods that help comprehensively study, explore, and analyze such problems in-depth and in detail. The paper obtains the field research, literary study, conceptual modeling, and textual analysis.
People suddenly find themselves in a new and incomprehensible situation. Modernization and globalization have also created the necessary conditions for the emergence of the COVID-19 crisis (Lupton and Willis 20-30). When the existing picture of the world becomes strange and unfamiliar – this becomes the starting point for the action (Little). Governments impose various restrictions on social life to “smooth the curve” (Ward 726-735). Functionalists note that to ensure survival, humanity must adapt to the environment (Little). This concept is a kind of discovery, rethinking the priorities and individual characteristics. (Lenzi 110-122). According to Foucault’s concept, the preservation and development of human life are a central, unifying value that underlies all sociology politics, and interests (Little). Indeed, the contemporary world is a time that generates new myths, rituals, and images (Alexander and Smith 264). It is filled with secrets and various superstitions about the virus.
Works Cited
Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Philip Smith. “COVID-19 and Symbolic Action: Global Pandemic as Code, Narrative, and Cultural Performance.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology, vol. 8, 2020, pp. 263-269.
Lenzi, Francesca Romana. “COVID-19: Rethinking Global Society.” Italian Sociological Review, vol. 11, no. 1, 2021, pp. 109-128.
Little, William. Introduction to Sociology – 2nd Canadian Edition. BCcampus, 2016. Web.
Lupton, Deborah and Karen Willis. The COVID-19 Crisis. Routledge, 2021.
Ward, Paul R. “A Sociology of the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Commentary and Research Agenda for Sociologists.” Journal of Sociology, vol. 56, no. 4, 2020, pp. 726-735.