New book: "Sustainable Health and the Covid-19 Crisis: Interdisciplinary Perspectives"
This edited collection offers interdisciplinary perspectives on some of the key health challenges faced by individuals, communities, and governments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Taking the Danish context as a starting point, it extrapolates to discuss the international relevance of a range of issues.
The book contains 4 parts:
- Part 1 looks at the societal reactions to COVID-19, discussing issues around health communication, legitimacy, ethics, and bio-politics
- Part 2 approaches the health and well-being of specific groups during the crisis
- Part 3 assesses how the crisis stimulated sustainable solutions to key problems, from digital methods for delivery of healthcare, to changes to the food supply chain
- Part 4 looks broadly at how historical developments in the study of epidemiology and current scientific perspectives enable the understanding and, to some extent, management of the COVID-19 pandemic
With contributions from scholars across the social sciences, health sciences, and humanities, each chapter provides not only insight into a particular issue, but also the theories and scientific methods applied to understand and overcome the COVID-19 crisis. It will be important reading for both scholars and policy makers, informing an appropriate response to future health crises. Part 4 of the book features the chapter "Framing the roots of critical COVID-19 public health concepts: Intersecting history and epidemiology" by PandemiX scholars Maarten van Wijhe, Søren Poder, Andreas Thomas Eilersen and Lone Simonsen. This chapter merges history and epidemiology in an investigation of the historical context and importance of some of the most critical mitigation strategies employed during the COVID-19 pandemic: quarantines and isolation, hygiene, and vaccination. It explores what we have learned from the past, how these experiences shaped the response to COVID-19, and how they can help pave the way to better pandemic preparedness.