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COVID-19 photo essay: We’re all in this together

About the author, department of global communications.

The United Nations Department of Global Communications (DGC) promotes global awareness and understanding of the work of the United Nations.

23 June 2020 – The COVID-19 pandemic has  demonstrated the interconnected nature of our world – and that no one is safe until everyone is safe.  Only by acting in solidarity can communities save lives and overcome the devastating socio-economic impacts of the virus.  In partnership with the United Nations, people around the world are showing acts of humanity, inspiring hope for a better future. 

Everyone can do something    

Rauf Salem, a volunteer, instructs children on the right way to wash their hands, in Sana'a, Yemen.  Simple measures, such as maintaining physical distance, washing hands frequently and wearing a mask are imperative if the fight against COVID-19 is to be won.  Photo: UNICEF/UNI341697

Creating hope

Venezuelan refugee Juan Batista Ramos, 69, plays guitar in front of a mural he painted at the Tancredo Neves temporary shelter in Boa Vista, Brazil to help lift COVID-19 quarantine blues.  “Now, everywhere you look you will see a landscape to remind us that there is beauty in the world,” he says.  Ramos is among the many artists around the world using the power of culture to inspire hope and solidarity during the pandemic.  Photo: UNHCR/Allana Ferreira

Inclusive solutions

Wendy Schellemans, an education assistant at the Royal Woluwe Institute in Brussels, models a transparent face mask designed to help the hard of hearing.  The United Nations and partners are working to ensure that responses to COVID-19 leave no one behind.  Photo courtesy of Royal Woluwe Institute

Humanity at its best

Maryna, a community worker at the Arts Centre for Children and Youth in Chasiv Yar village, Ukraine, makes face masks on a sewing machine donated by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and civil society partner, Proliska.  She is among the many people around the world who are voluntarily addressing the shortage of masks on the market. Photo: UNHCR/Artem Hetman

Keep future leaders learning

A mother helps her daughter Ange, 8, take classes on television at home in Man, Côte d'Ivoire.  Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, caregivers and educators have responded in stride and have been instrumental in finding ways to keep children learning.  In Côte d'Ivoire, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) partnered with the Ministry of Education on a ‘school at home’ initiative, which includes taping lessons to be aired on national TV and radio.  Ange says: “I like to study at home.  My mum is a teacher and helps me a lot.  Of course, I miss my friends, but I can sleep a bit longer in the morning.  Later I want to become a lawyer or judge."  Photo: UNICEF/UNI320749

Global solidarity

People in Nigeria’s Lagos State simulate sneezing into their elbows during a coronavirus prevention campaign.  Many African countries do not have strong health care systems.  “Global solidarity with Africa is an imperative – now and for recovering better,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.  “Ending the pandemic in Africa is essential for ending it across the world.” Photo: UNICEF Nigeria/2020/Ojo

A new way of working

Henri Abued Manzano, a tour guide at the United Nations Information Service (UNIS) in Vienna, speaks from his apartment.  COVID-19 upended the way people work, but they can be creative while in quarantine.  “We quickly decided that if visitors can’t come to us, we will have to come to them,” says Johanna Kleinert, Chief of the UNIS Visitors Service in Vienna.  Photo courtesy of Kevin Kühn

Life goes on

Hundreds of millions of babies are expected to be born during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Fionn, son of Chloe O'Doherty and her husband Patrick, is among them.  The couple says: “It's all over.  We did it.  Brought life into the world at a time when everything is so uncertain.  The relief and love are palpable.  Nothing else matters.”  Photo: UNICEF/UNI321984/Bopape

Putting meals on the table

Sudanese refugee Halima, in Tripoli, Libya, says food assistance is making her life better.  COVID-19 is exacerbating the existing hunger crisis.  Globally, 6 million more people could be pushed into extreme poverty unless the international community acts now.  United Nations aid agencies are appealing for more funding to reach vulnerable populations.  Photo: UNHCR

Supporting the frontlines

The United Nations Air Service, run by the World Food Programme (WFP), distributes protective gear donated by the Jack Ma Foundation and Alibaba Group, in Somalia. The United Nations is using its supply chain capacity to rapidly move badly needed personal protective equipment, such as medical masks, gloves, gowns and face-shields to the frontline of the battle against COVID-19. Photo: WFP/Jama Hassan  

S7-Episode 2: Bringing Health to the World

“You see, we're not doing this work to make ourselves feel better. That sort of conventional notion of what a do-gooder is. We're doing this work because we are totally convinced that it's not necessary in today's wealthy world for so many people to be experiencing discomfort, for so many people to be experiencing hardship, for so many people to have their lives and their livelihoods imperiled.”

Dr. David Nabarro has dedicated his life to global health. After a long career that’s taken him from the horrors of war torn Iraq, to the devastating aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami, he is still spurred to action by the tremendous inequalities in global access to medical care.

“The thing that keeps me awake most at night is the rampant inequities in our world…We see an awful lot of needless suffering.”

:: David Nabarro interviewed by Melissa Fleming

Brazilian ballet pirouettes during pandemic

Ballet Manguinhos, named for its favela in Rio de Janeiro, returns to the stage after a long absence during the COVID-19 pandemic. It counts 250 children and teenagers from the favela as its performers. The ballet group provides social support in a community where poverty, hunger and teen pregnancy are constant issues.

Radio journalist gives the facts on COVID-19 in Uzbekistan

The pandemic has put many people to the test, and journalists are no exception. Coronavirus has waged war not only against people's lives and well-being but has also spawned countless hoaxes and scientific falsehoods.

Coronavirus

COVID-19 photo essay reflects on the day our lives changed forever three years ago

By Kate Christian

Topic: COVID-19

The pandemic changed people's lives in ways that were previously unthinkable. ( ABC News: Andrew O'Connor )

While it feels almost a lifetime ago for some, it's been exactly three years since a state of emergency was declared in Western Australia as the novel coronavirus began to send shock waves around the world. 

Already isolated by its geography, the unprecedented move cemented the state as a hermit kingdom and fundamentally changed the way sandgropers went about their daily lives. 

This picture essay illustrates a pivotal and unsettling chapter in our history, and reflects how the virus dictated the way we lived.

Panic and confusion

COVID-19 was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, but the panic didn't set in until a couple of months later when news of mass deaths overseas was beamed in to living rooms across Australia.

The virus captivated the entire world, but the threat really hit home when Australia recorded its first COVID death on March 1 — a Perth man who had been aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship. 

Australians were given a stern warning to return home as soon as possible ahead of the country's border being slammed shut, with international arrivals forced into hotel quarantine in an effort to stop the deadly virus getting in.

The first round of COVID-19 restrictions, including gathering limits and indoor venue closures, started to give people an inkling of how much their lives were about to be turned upside down. 

Holidays and big events were cancelled, weddings went online and Rottnest Island went from the home of quokka selfies to a quarantine hub for cruise ship passengers. 

Lines curled around liquor stores as the fear of being locked down without a cold stubbie or red wine in hand was too much to bear for most, while subscriptions to streaming services went through the roof. 

Grocery store shelves were stripped bare and arguments broke out in supermarket aisles as panic buying led to a nationwide toilet paper drought.

ABC reporter Francesca Mann dared to dream when she saw a shopper walk past her with the rare commodity at a Geraldton supermarket.

"I could not believe my eyes," she said.

"I quickly walked over to the toilet paper aisle and there were about seven packs left. It felt like the most valuable item at the time, so it got the royal treatment on the way home."

Mann snapped an equally humorous shot of her pet cat Arya sprawled across her desk in the first few days of working from home. 

'Stop the spread'

The state introduced its first round of border restrictions at the end of March, restricting interstate travel to stop the virus spreading between regions and to protect vulnerable Indigenous communities. 

On April 5, 2020, the WA government implemented its harshest border restrictions yet, slamming its borders shut — not just to international arrivals, but to the east as well. 

It marked the beginning of an upsetting chapter in the state's history, leaving families divided for two years and living up to Premier Mark McGowan's promise to turn WA into an "island within an island".

The travel restrictions wreaked havoc on the tourism and events industries, but it also created a spike in domestic tourism when the state eased restrictions to allow West Australians to holiday in their own backyard. 

Sandgropers swapped their annual pilgrimage to Bali for the sublime sunsets in Broome, the chance to swim with whale sharks in Exmouth or to see the ancient gorges in the Karijini National Park.

But Perth's bustling city centre had turned into a ghost town as West Australians dutifully obeyed restrictions, which shut down the city. 

Just a few pedestrians could be spotted in Forrest Place in April, 2020. Image: Hugh Sando.

Even a trip to the beach came with reminders to practise social distancing. Image: Amelia Searson.

Trains crisscrossed the city virtually empty. Image: Hugh Sando.

The doors to restaurants, cafes and bars were shuttered. Image: Rebecca Mansell.

The state library was eerily empty. Image: Emma Wynne.

Children were cooped up inside as playgrounds closed. Image: Gian De Poloni.

Slogans like this started popping up around Perth as people banded together to face the crisis. Image: Damian Smith.

For weeks, the cruise ship Artania became the focus of a tense stand-off between the operator and Mr McGowan, who demanded it leave WA waters.

Anzac Day that year was unlike any other due to the traditional service and march being cancelled — the first time since 1942.

Veterans and families instead marked Anzac Day from the end of their suburban driveways.

By this stage, the virus dominated every aspect of our lives.

Even the security guard, Steve, who opened the door for the premier before he delivered his daily press conference, had become part of life under COVID.

Living inside the bubble

Restrictions were gradually eased in May after the virus was eliminated, allowing West Australians to continue living relatively normally for many months compared to what was happening over east.

With no community transmission, WA moved from a hard border to a controlled border in October, with authorities continually lowering and lifting the drawbridge in line with outbreaks in other states. 

On December 5, a tool was unveiled that would dramatically change the way West Australians interacted with the world around them.

The trio of snap lockdowns

But it was impossible to keep the virus out forever, with the state's 10-month coronavirus-free streak ending on January 21, 2021 when a hotel quarantine security guard tested positive.

Perth was locked down twice more in 2021 — from April 24 to April 27 after a hotel quarantine outbreak and from June 29 to July 3 after three COVID cases were detected in the community. 

Vaccine hesitancy takes hold

In October, one of the most divisive policies in WA's history was announced — mandatory vaccination for 75 per cent of the state's workforce.

Some were concerned about potential health impacts from the vaccine and felt it was impinging on people's right to have autonomy over their own bodies, while others felt it was the only way to reopen the borders and protect people from the virus. 

When the double-dose vaccination rate reached 80 per cent in December, it was announced that WA would finally reopen its border to the rest of the world on February 5, 2022.

But the joy that rippled through the community was short-lived, with WA Premier Mark McGowan performing a sensational backflip just a few weeks later at a late night press conference when he announced the reopening would be delayed.

However, it turned out the virulent strain was circulating in the community anyway, and the virus started to spread significantly for the first time in two years. 

'Let it rip'

On February 18, Mr McGowan made the announcement many had been waiting for — WA's hard border would come down on March 3 as he conceded it was no longer possible to stop the spread of the virus.

Many employers, including ABC News in Perth, quickly reverted to working from home arrangements for all but operationally critical staff to minimise the risk of spreading the virus in the workplace. 

As case numbers grew, so too did tensions between the state government and peak medical groups that warned against easing restrictions, as cracks in the hospital system deepened.

After being on the frontline of the battle against COVID, health workers began rallying for better pay, which would eventually lead to full-scale industrial action. 

As vaccination rates rose and the COVID outbreak in WA eased in April, the McGowan Government lifted most mask-wearing requirements but the Perth CBD remained a ghost town. 

Most remaining restrictions were removed in May as the triple-dose vaccination rate hit 80 per cent, but many vulnerable West Australians chose to stay home to shield themselves from the virus. 

But COVID continued to fade into the background for most, as the things that derailed our lives — lockdowns, mandatory isolation, mask and vaccine mandates— gradually became distant memories.

Living with the virus

People have learned how to live with the virus, and getting the vaccine has become about as normal as getting a yearly flu jab. 

After 963 days, WA's state of emergency finally ended on November 4, but the heartache caused by the 956 people who lost their lives, and the far-reaching impact on society and people's livelihoods, will be felt for years to come. 

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Friday essay: COVID in ten photos

Lecturer of art history, Griffith University

Disclosure statement

Chari Larsson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Griffith University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Our memories are malleable, they change over time. Memories can, however, crystallise through repetition. One of the most interesting things about memory is it is distinctly visual. With time, dramatic events reduce to a series of still images, which psychologists call “ flashbulb memories ”. Retrieving them is akin to rifling through a visual database.

The history of war photography offers many powerful examples of how memory and photographic images work together to symbolise entire events.

Consider one of the most famous news images from the Vietnam War, Nick Ut’s image of nine-year old Phan Thị Kim Phúc , badly burned and running down the road after a napalm attack. Or the Abu Ghraib photographs of prisoner abuse in the American military .

Viruses are distinctly anti-spectacular. They are invisible. We can, nevertheless, capture their impact. In 1990, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in America, Life magazine published an image of a dying man, David Kirby, surrounded by his anguished family. Therese Frare’s photograph was credited for humanising HIV and raising much needed awareness.

We are still in the early days of this pandemic. It is not too premature, however, to start writing its history through images. Here are some of the photos that captured the impact of COVID-19 in Australia.

The Ruby Princess stranded

Networks of globalisation, such as the tourism industry, helped spread the virus between countries. This image was taken from the Waverley Cemetery, in Sydney’s east in early April. Tightly framed by gravestones, the Ruby Princess cruise ship intersects with the strong blue of the horizon.

Sydney is reimagined as an ancient burial site, a necropolis, a city of the dead.

It is not unusual for cruise liners to sit off the city’s coast. This photograph is chilling, however because of the large cluster of COVID-19 infections linked to this ship. When Joel Carrett took this photograph, passengers had already disembarked, and health authorities were scrambling to control community transmission.

Sometimes, images are powerful because they have long historical links. Ships have historically been carriers of disease, treated suspiciously by coastal towns and ports.

During the height of the Black Death in the 14th century, the citizens of Venice realised infected persons were on ships and the best defence was isolation. The modern term quarantine is derived from the Italian quaranta giorni , the 40 days vessels were kept offshore.

Read more: Fleas to flu to coronavirus: how 'death ships' spread disease through the ages

Bondi Beach crowds

We were still learning how to socially distance in March and adhere to the government’s advice to “stay at home” when images of beach-lovers making the most of Sydney’s glorious Indian summer went viral on social media.

The beach occupies a sacred place in our national psyche: a place of leisure and of freedom. What was ominous about this image, however, was the crowd’s ability to render a usually benign activity into a menacing threat.

Centrelink queue, Sydney

The most visceral signs of an economy in free fall came in late March with long queues of people waiting outside Centrelink offices across the country. As the myGov website collapsed under the strain, people were forced onto the streets, echoing scenes from Depression-era unemployment .

This photograph is cropped, leaving the viewer’s eye to run down the line of umbrellas, before pausing to rest on the woman in the yellow jumper and clear poncho. Her body language speaks of exasperation and frustration.

The image is taken at street level, a powerful levelling effect: the spectator joins the queue.

A very different strategy is at play in this 1932 image of the dole queue at Sydney’s Harold Park. Here, the photographer captures the group from an elevated position. This creates the effect of “hovering” above the queue like a bird. The spectator remains separate and apart from the crowd. The telegraph pole reinforces this division.

Panic buying, Coles supermarket

In March, supermarket shelves were emptying as Australians started panic buying essentials such as toilet paper, pasta and rice.

The idea of an image being active and capable of influencing our behaviour is underscored by photographs of empty supermarket shelves. Images such as these helped fuel further panic buying, reinforcing the misconception we were running out of food.

Read more: Disagreeability, neuroticism and stress: what drives panic buying during the COVID-19 pandemic

In this image, the bare shelves retreat, drawing the spectator’s eye diagonally backwards towards the far wall. People wait patiently while maintaining a careful distance from each other. The spectator’s eye returns to rest with the central seated figure. His posture indicates fatigued resignation.

Panic buying is not unprecedented in Australia. During World War II, food and clothing rationing was introduced to control consumption and ensure equitable distribution of resources.

This archival image shows people in Melbourne stocking up on meat in 1944 in advance of impending rationing. The small enclosed space feels claustrophobic as shoppers crowd in, waiting to be served.

Public housing towers lockdown, Melbourne

Physical distancing is a luxury not everyone can afford. COVID-19 thrives in dense living spaces, making visible class and race divisions. The early July lockdown of nine public housing towers in Melbourne was a blunt reminder the pandemic embeds itself in communities that house some of our most vulnerable. The towers were presented as crime scenes, sealed off with police tape.

David Crosling’s photograph is striking because of its distinct lack of people. The police tape occupies the immediate foreground, while the towers rise threateningly in the distance.

On closer inspection, a solitary figure can be detected in the left middle ground. The pathway leads the viewer’s eye straight to a COVID-19 testing tent. The site is registered as a crime scene; a barrier is placed between the spectator and the towers.

The absence of people became a foreboding sign of what was to come: Melbourne’s “hard lockdown”.

Empty Melbourne CBD

The atmosphere is bleak and unnerving. An empty city is a lonely city. A city needs its people. Today, the usually bustling alleyways in Melbourne’s CBD lie mute, waiting for the stage four restrictions to pass.

An eerie quality emerges when architectural landscapes are silent and empty. Usually an index of vitality, the street art in the foreground of the image is transformed, becoming a trace or relic of former human activity.

Images of Melbourne devoid of its people resonate with Eugène Atget ’s photographs of the “old Paris”. Working at the turn of the 20th century, Atget focused on documenting the old, disappearing streets of Paris under pressure to modernise.

Writing in the 1930s, German philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin observed Atget’s images were like deserted crime scenes “photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence”.

They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way.

A crime scene asks more from its spectator than just viewing passively. Instead, the spectator becomes a witness or bystander.

Read more: Friday essay: the uncanny melancholy of empty photographs in the time of coronavirus

Face mask and face shield

As the virus asserts its grip, the face mask has now become a symbol of the next phase of our collective efforts to suppress COVID-19.

The practice of wearing a mask in the times of disease and pandemics has a long history. The medieval Latin word masca ominously means “spectre or nightmare”.

In the 17th century, plague doctors were recognised by their distinctive beak-like masks when attending sick patients, protecting the doctors from “bad air” and preventing contagion.

Centuries on, the basic premise of creating a barrier between the patient and the health workforce remains remarkably the same.

Temporary memorial, St Basil’s Homes for the Aged

Australia has avoided the rampant transmission and devastating loss of life seen in parts of Europe, the USA and Brazil. Our mortality rates, nevertheless, are steadily creeping upwards as the pandemic spreads, particularly in aged care facilities.

We haven’t seen images like the overflowing intensive care wards in Italy , or the drone footage of New York’s mass graves . For privacy and ethical reasons, photographs from inside aged care homes and intensive care wards are rare. Our understanding of the deaths is thus shaped by personal photographs of COVID-19’s victims released by their families or photos of the exteriors of aged care homes.

In late July, temporary memorials were set up outside one of the hardest hit facilities, St Basil’s Home for the Aged. Here, fences create a barrier between the photographer and the buildings. For the viewer, the physicality of lockdown is reinforced.

Healthcare workers in PPE

Frontline health workers in full personal protective equipment have largely become the face of COVID-19.

Widespread testing is proving crucial to controlling the pandemic. Here, healthcare workers are captured working at a drive through clinic. The camera’s lens is focused on the middle ground, with the staff rendered crisply in silhouette. Healthcare workers are our first and last line of defence against COVID-19.

There is unlikely to be one single photograph that comes to symbolise the pandemic. But it is possible to start reflecting on images that have been instrumental in shaping policy and debate.

These images serve as a chronicle of the disorientating early days of COVID-19 in Australia.

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• Signs of the Times: Public Displays at the Height of the COVID-19 Pandemic

From politics and the pandemic to Halloween and graduation, 2020 was notable for its proliferation of citizen signage. This photo essay provides a time capsule of the COVID-19 era in West Philadelphia. 

By Kelly Diaz

Like so many people did during those days of fear and uncertainty that marked the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, I brought home a puppy. A “cavachon” (Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and Bichon Frise mix), Matilda (“Tillie”) was eight weeks old when I got her in May 2020, and while she was potty training, she needed up to 10 walks a day.

It was frustrating for me to spend so much time of the day away from my computer, taking breaks that the diligent graduate student in me did not think I had earned.

But I took comfort in Tanya Behrisch’s “Slow” philosophy . In reference to the time she spent cooking for herself and loved ones, she explains:

“Rather than viewing those hours in neoliberal time as ‘lost hours’ I want to shift to a Slow appreciation of ‘gained hours.’ [...] Care work requires Slowing down, taking time to notice what should be done, for whom, when, and how. The Slow movement invites me to explore this relational process through research, writing, and embodied practice of cooking for others (p. 3).”

With this in mind, I realized my puppy would never be so young and impressionable again. Each day she got older, bigger, and more independent. Work would always be there needing my attention, but my precious fur baby would not. 

Throughout some of the hardest and most stressful months of my life, I was cheered up by the fresh air, Tillie’s adorable sidewalk strut, and the messages my neighbors displayed in the windows, balconies, porches, and yards of residential buildings and storefronts. I began to consider the visual messaging on graffiti, memorial displays, flyers, and other citizen signage.

Between May and December of 2020, I took photographs of these displays on my iPhone as I walked Tillie through the streets of West Philadelphia, in particular the University City and Spruce Hill neighborhoods. You will find a gallery of these images below.  

A Constellation of Issues

In a Slate.com article about the trend of posting signs in the early months of the pandemic, journalist Henry Grabar wrote, “Chicago is empty of people but full of signs [...] Every city is like this now, as if our protective masks stifled the ability to speak and left us to communicate only in writing.”

As those who lived through 2020 recall, there was no shortage of fodder for signage.

The pandemic coincided with a presidential election, which exponentially increased the degree to which people were displaying a national identity and concern. 

Another significant percentage of the signs expressed “thank you” messages for essential workers who were continuing to leave their homes and risk COVID exposure to keep the community running. These were, at times, bright and uplifting artwork to demonstrate one’s positive outlook in the midst of crisis and tragedy.

As protests against racial injustice and anti-Blackness in the United States grew, many residents in my neighborhood displayed either homemade or commercially manufactured Black Lives Matter signs to demonstrate an intolerance for violence and discrimination against Black Americans. 

Performing One’s Values

Signs are both display and performance, a way that people articulate their definition of self as someone who takes public health seriously and is community-oriented.

Just as many of the themes overlapped, so too did the media. Images that were made by hand with markers or crayons and hung in windows may have also been photographed and uploaded to Instagram or Facebook. Similarly, the immediate intended audience might be passersby, but it could also be one’s own social media followers or the extended networks of anyone who walks by and takes a picture as I did, and now share with you in the gallery below.

As I took these photos, I thought about Erving Goffman’s 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life . It helped me to see the signs as a means of performing identity, gratitude, care, and allyship. This is not to say that the displays are not genuine, but rather that they are calculated and intentional attempts to put forward into the world an image of oneself through a visual. Goffman writes:

“The individual may attempt to induce the audience to judge him and the situation in a particular way, and he may seek this judgment as an ultimate end in itself, and yet he may not completely believe that he deserves the valuation of self which he asks for or that the impression or reality which he fosters is valid (p. 21).”

Indeed, I saw many signs that seem to have been made and displayed in order to have an audience “judge” (in a positive sense) the person or household sharing that message or “performance.” I imagine that some of my neighbors hoped to be viewed by passersby as anti-racists or feminists or Biden/Harris supporters.

As Goffman suggests, however, many might have found that even after creating the display of care or identity they still felt guilty or insecure about their place in our deeply flawed society. This was certainly true of myself. 

What Goes Unseen

Performative allyship has been critiqued widely as a phenomenon wherein people seek attention for their support for justice without doing actual justice work. While I recognize this problem, I can also see merits to the displays of allyship in this context. After all, performing allyship is not in itself a problem, if accompanied by action.  

As a new member of the community, it was comforting and affirming to see my neighbors’ values on display through this signage. While I recognized the many problematic ways that people have engaged in virtue signaling, in this case, I wanted my neighbors to signal their virtues to me. If I wanted to know, for example, that it was safe to wear my Pride shirt around the neighborhood, I could find my answer in many of the signs displayed by my neighbors. 

I thought about the labor and care people took to make homemade signs, though this does not necessarily point to further social action. I also thought about how it would be easy to judge someone for simply displaying a commercially made sign, though at times those signs come as a result of a donation to a justice organization. In this case, people displaying them have “put their money where their mouth is” and directly supported the cause.

Assigning motivation was, of course, impossible. In these times of social distancing, I was unable to pair the displays of allyship through signage with discussions with the creators about their social justice work. It was also not clear which signs came from allies and which came from people directly impacted.

Politics on Display

While lawn and window signs are common every election season, I do wonder if there was an increase in signage to compensate for the loss of other forms of political identity and candidate support during physical distancing. For example, people who usually wear campaign t-shirts, pins, and hats might have instead opted for a sign that they could display from the safety of their home, while still reaching an audience.

The signs were also a reflection of our local political leanings. The prevalence of Black Lives Matter, Biden/Harris signs, and COVID-19 safety signs was notable in the absence of signage in support of police, the Trump/Pence administration, or claims that COVID-19 was a hoax to be ignored.

The few times I left the community this summer I found myself in areas with large numbers of Blue Lives Matter products, signs demanding that the government reopen restaurants and shops, and Trump 2020 flags.

The difference in my degree of safety and comfort as a queer woman of color was palpable in those communities versus in my own, and I was proud to see the intolerance of racism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination on display amongst West Philadelphia residents — acknowledging, of course, that these generalizations do not apply to all residents.

Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

Another thing that caught my attention were the contrasts in subject matter. While people were mourning the loss of lives and experiences due to COVID-19 and white supremacy, people were also celebrating graduations and holidays. Once mundane Halloween decorations such as tombstones and skeletons took on a new meaning for me when I encountered them during a period of mass death. 

While people were calling for police abolition, they were also expressing gratitude for postal and sanitation workers who had been working through frustrating budget cuts and high COVID-19 risk.

The images also demonstrated the ways in which mundane and regular tasks persisted even throughout the COVID crisis. People continued to grab coffee at the local café, get their flu shots, and wash their clothes at the laundromat, even as the logistics of these tasks changed greatly.

Although many photographs below captured similar displays, no two photos are identical. Even when signs were exactly the same in content, they varied in terms of placement, materiality, size, and many other factors. 

This collection is useful even in 2020 as a way to understand West Philadelphia residents in 2020, and it will likely be even more valuable in future years as a time capsule. While I took these photos without asking for permission, I hope that by sharing them, I am honoring the West Philadelphia community that gave me a warm welcome and offered me a home during some of the most difficult months of my life. 

Kelly Diaz is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication.

West Philadelphia During COVID

Use the arrows to scroll through photos taken by Kelly Diaz on her iPhone between May and December of 2020.

• HISTORY & CULTURE
• CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE

Photos show the first 2 years of a world transformed by COVID-19

Our photographers bore witness to the ways the world has coped—and changed—since the pandemic began.

Two years ago this month, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization formally declared a pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus . And as COVID-19 spread across the globe, humanity had little time to adapt to lockdowns and staggering losses.

Nearly six million people have died from the disease so far, a death toll that experts say barely scratches the surface of the pandemic’s true harm. Hospitals and health care workers have been pushed to the brink, debates over masking have tested our bonds, and millions of grieving families will never truly return to life as normal—if it’s even possible to go back to a time when “social distancing” was an alien concept.  

Over past two years, National Geographic has documented how the world has coped with COVID-19 through the lenses of more than 80 photographers in dozens of countries. In the frightening early days, Cédric Gerbehave’s haunting image of Belgian nurses revealed the trauma of hospitals overrun by a disease that scientists didn’t yet understand. Tamara Merino confronted the overwhelming isolation of confinement during lockdown in Chile. And Muhammad Fadli took us to the gravesite of one of the many COVID-19 victims whose bodies filled up an Indonesian cemetery.

Our photographers have also shown us how the world adapted to these challenges. Families found new ways to connect when social distancing kept us from our loved ones, and new ways to grieve when we couldn’t hold funerals. Schools from Haiti to South Korea were able to safely reopen with mask mandates, smaller classes, and exams taken outdoors. And the 2021 graduating class of Howard University found a joyous way to celebrate commencement outdoors: by dancing down the streets of Washington, D.C.

Now, as we enter the pandemic’s third year, scientists warn that it isn’t over yet. More than 10 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally—but that isn’t enough to quell the danger of future surges and even more deadly variants . Still, there’s reason to hope that we’ll finally find our way toward a new normal.

Many of these images were made with the support of the National Geographic Society's   COVID-19 Emergency Fund for Journalists , which launched in March 2020 and funded more than 324 projects in over 70 countries. These projects revealed the social, emotional, economic, educational, and equity issues threatening livelihoods all over the world.

Physician Gerald Foret dons a full-face respirator mask before seeing COVID-19 patients at Our Lady of the Angels Hospital in Bogalusa, Louisiana. The mask was donated to the hospital when it was running low on disposable N95 masks. In the early months of the pandemic, health-care systems faced severe shortages of personal protective equipment such as face masks and disposable gloves—putting front-line workers like Foret in further jeopardy.

A baby is born at the only maternity hospital in Dagestan, Russia. Located on the southernmost tip of Russia along the Caspian Sea, the Muslim-majority republic suffered a catastrophic surge of coronavirus deaths in the spring of 2020. The losses in Dagestan raised questions about whether the Russian government was obscuring the pandemic’s true death toll.

Alfonso Sellano, age 64, battles COVID-19 while his wife and a nurse tend to him in Espinar, Peru. As of March 2022, the country has the highest COVID-19 death rate in the world , which experts say can be attributed to the country’s weak health-care system and pervasive social inequalities that make it difficult for marginalized people to protect themselves from the virus. For instance, many had to continue commuting to work even during lockdown in order to provide for their families.

Hours of work in a protective mask leave a transient scar down the face of Yves Bouckaert, the chief intensive care unit physician at Tivoli Hospital in La Louvière, Belgium.  

Ghislaine, a nurse in the geriatric ward at the same hospital, poses for a portrait with a tear running down her cheek. These photos were taken during the third wave of COVID-19, which triggered a new round of lockdowns in March 2021.

In Mons, Belgium, nursing colleagues take brief refuge in a shift break and each other’s company. Like medical facilities around the world, Belgian hospitals were initially overwhelmed by the rush of patients with a virulent new disease. These nurses, pulled from their standard duties, were thrown into full-time COVID-19 work—reinforcement troops for a long, exhausting battle.

COVID-19 has posed a particularly grave threat to Africa’s informal urban settlements —communities with high poverty rates where millions of people live in close quarters and often do not have access to clean water or toilets. In Nairobi, Kenya, residents of the Kibera informal settlement have their temperature checked by community health workers at a station set up by Shining Hope for Communities on March 26, 2020.

Home health-care worker Delores Jetton bathes her client Jean Robbins in a sunlit bedroom. “She is slow and prayerful as she bathes each person, washing with warm water and a touch that is so appreciated by these elders, who often face pain and fear at the end of life,” writes photographer Lynn Johnson. “As the bath progresses, one can see Robbins literally surrender to the touch.”  

Even with the availability of effective vaccines, people over 65 remain at high risk of dying from COVID-19 . Many have been told to stay home rather than visit health clinics in person—causing a significant rise in demand for home health workers, who have often found themselves stretched to exhaustion in these past two years.

The mummified body of a COVID-19 victim lies on the patient’s deathbed awaiting a bodybag in Jakarta, Indonesia. It took two nurses about an hour to wrap the patient in plastic—a measure intended to keep the coronavirus from spreading. Indonesians were shocked when they saw this image, which humanizes the losses of COVID-19 and horror of death from the disease.

“It’s clear that the power of this image has galvanized discussion about coronavirus,” photographer Joshua Irwandi told National Geographic in July 2020 . “We have to recognize the sacrifice, and the risk, that the doctors and nurses are making.”

At the Rayer Bazar graveyard in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Farid conducts the janazah , an Islamic funeral prayer, for a COVID-19 victim and his relatives attending the burial. Bangladesh designated the cemetery as its official burial place for COVID-19 victims in April 2020.

Defying Peruvian government protocols, the Shipibo-Konibo have organized illegal mourning and funerals during the pandemic to honor their dead as their tradition dictates. At the funeral of Milena Canayo, who died in July 2020 with symptoms of COVID-19, her 9-year-old daughter lights a candle before taking refuge at home. Shipibo-Konibo people live in the Amazon rainforest of Peru, including in cities like Pucallpa where Milena's funeral was held. But she was not treated at the local hospital—Ronald Suarez, head of the organization Coshikox, says the health and welfare of Indigenous people is always the last to be considered.  

Workers from a funeral home in Huancavelica wait until the end of a service to move a coffin into a grave at a city cemetery in April 2021. Much like the rest of the country, this city in central Peru has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

After keeping their social distance during the New York City funeral of Annie Lewis, family members draw together around the casket to say a final goodbye. In the United States, COVID-19 has been particularly devastating for low-income communities of color. As photographer Ruddy Roye told National Geographic , “The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the divisions in our city.”

Relatives visit a loved one’s fresh grave at Rorotan Public Cemetery in Cilincing, North Jakarta, Indonesia, on July 21, 2021. The cemetery, which is dedicated to COVID-19 victims, opened in March. Even though it can hold up to 7,200 people, the cemetery filled up fast during the surge in cases caused by the Delta variant—which made Indonesia an epicenter of the pandemic. In response, Jakarta's government planned to add more land to the 25-hectare cemetery.

Elaine Fields, with her daughter Etana Fields-Purdy, stand close to her husband's gravesite at the Elmwood Cemetary in Detroit, on June 14, 2020. Eddie Fields, a retired General Motors plant worker, had died from COVID-19 complications in April. "It's hard because we haven't been able to mourn,” Elaine told photographer Wayne Lawrence . “We weren't able to be with him or have a funeral, so our mourning has been stunted."

Detroit journalist Biba Adams stands for a portrait at her home with daughter Maria Williams and granddaughter Gia Williams in Detroit on June 10, 2020. Adams lost her mother, grandmother, and aunt to the coronavirus. “To lose one’s mother is one thing,” Adams said in late July 2020 , when U.S. pandemic death totals were pushing past 150,000. “To lose her as one of 150,000 people is even more painful. I don’t want her to just be a number. She had dreams, things she still wanted to do. She was a person. And I am going to lift her name up.”

Family members place flowers atop the coffin of Eric Hallett, 76, just before a hearse carries his body to the crematorium in Crewkerne, England, on May 4, 2020. Pandemic safety protocols forced the crematorium to limit the number of mourners at each funeral. Instead, Hallett’s loved ones lined the streets to wave goodbye.

Sisters Dana Cobbs and Darcey Cobbs-Lomax lost both their father and paternal grandmother to COVID-19 in April 2020. Evelyn Cobbs was rushed to the hospital in ambulances just one day after her son Morgan—and the two died within a week of one another. Photographer Celeste Sloman took this virtual portrait of the sisters, who had to say goodbye to their loved ones from a distance due to the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

White flags planted on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. represent each of the American lives lost to COVID-19. When the art installation opened in September 2021, the country had surpassed 670,000 deaths. For more than 30 hours, photographer and National Geographic Explorer Stephen Wilkes watched people move through the sea of white flags , capturing individuals as they grappled with the enormity of loss. Wilkes took 4,882 photographs of the exhibit, then blended them into a single composite image as part of his Day to Night series.

Kristiana Nicole Bell attends a candlelight vigil at St. Margaret of Scotland Catholic Church in Foley, Alabama, where she was baptized later that evening. The service, held the night before Easter Sunday, was led in both English and Spanish by Father Paul Zohgby. He decided about eight years ago that it was important to learn Spanish so he could welcome and minister to the community’s growing Latino immigrant population. Zohgby told photographer Natalie Keyssar that he was elated to rejoin his congregation in person after spending eight days in the hospital with severe COVID-19.

Quarantined for two weeks after traveling from Belgium to Shanghai, Justin Jin reads out his temperature to a medic on the other side of his closed hotel door. The picture was taken through the door’s peephole. Jin made the arduous journey to see his father, who just had surgery.

Photographer Ian Teh spends much of his working life on the road—so the pandemic allowed him to stay home with his wife, Chloe Lim, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. “My partner and I are lucky that both our families are safe,” he says. “The pandemic has been an opportunity for us to connect with our loved ones, virtually.” He took this self-portrait of the couple in a favorite spot in their apartment, looking out on nearby houses and greenery. “It’s peaceful,” he says.

Heavy rain falls on Buenos Aires, Argentina, on April 27, 2020. Argentina entered a full lockdown on March 20 that endured more than four months. Feeling trapped, and still recovering from a miscarriage, photographer Sarah Pabst picked up her camera to document her pandemic experiences. The result: Morning Song , a project that uses photography to explore motherhood, love, and loss, and our connection with nature.

Greta Tanini and Cristoforo Lippi decided to take advantage of Italy's quarantine lockdown—to regard their enforced time together as a new exploration of their relationship. They divided up domestic tasks—including shopping, cleaning, and tidying up—and limited their social interaction to chatting with neighbors at a safe distance so as not to spread the virus.

The Apollo Theater has been a Harlem landmark since the 1930s, when it helped propel music genres such as jazz, R & B, and the blues into the American mainstream. The Apollo was one of New York City’s many historic entertainment venues that closed in early 2020 to stem the spread of COVID-19. It remained shuttered for a year and a half—and finally returned, to much excitement, in August 2021.

In spring 2020, sculptor Antonio Canova's The Three Graces (1812-1817) stand alone in the rotunda of Milan’s Galleria d’Italia. COVID-19 lockdowns forced museums across Europe to close their door for months— sparking fears that the loss of revenue might keep them permanently closed. By June, however, some museums began to reopen with limited numbers of visitors, temperature checks, and socially distant experiences.

Photographer Mariceu Erthal took this self-portrait in July 2020 during her first visit to the sea after being confined at home by COVID-19 lockdowns. She says the experience “brought me peace of mind and allowed me to observe the sadness and anxieties I had inside.”

Photographer Bethany Mollenkof found out she was pregnant three months before COVID-19 shut down swaths of the United States. She began to document her own experiences during quarantine in Los Angeles—from her first ultrasound, which her husband had to watch from the parking lot over FaceTime, to childbirth. Although Mollenkof had hoped for a natural birth, she decided to deliver in a hospital in case of complications—which proved the right choice. After her water broke, her contractions did not start, and ultimately labor was induced to keep the baby safe.

  “I thought about my friends, my community, and what it would feel like to become new parents in isolation—to not have people around us to help, people who years later could tell our daughter that they’d held her when she was a few days old,” Mollenkof wrote in a photo essay for National Geographic . “But I also thought about women throughout history, women who have survived wars, pandemics, miscarriages. Their resilience guided me.”

Exhausted after giving birth to her daughter, Suzette, Kim Bonsignore lies in the birthing pool in her living room on April 20, 2020, in New York City. Instead of having her baby in the hospital as planned, the Bonsignores decided to have their second child at home when they learned that family members would not be allowed in the delivery room because of COVID-19 restrictions.

In Moscow, a nurse wearing a hazmat suit holds a bouquet of flowers for at Hospital No. 52 on March 9, 2020—or Victory Day. Russia’s most important national holiday commemorates the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945. Although celebrations were more subdued because of the pandemic, the hospital arranged a small tribute for veterans and their families under treatment.

Photographer Tamara Merino took this self-portrait with her son Ikal on the first day of total isolation in Santiago, Chile. “The confinement feels stronger and more overwhelming when someone imposes it on you,” she wrote. “When we have freedom over our actions, and we decide to stay home, we still feel free. Not anymore.”

Image of customers seen through a thermal scanner at the entrance of a supermarket in Ushuaia, the capital of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. The vast majority of food on the island is imported, and shopping is centralized in big supermarket chains—creating a challenge for social distancing. During lockdown, thermal scanners were placed in the supermarkets to take the temperature of incoming customers. Customers with elevated temperatures were sent home.

Girls form a socially distant queue to take a shower at a facility in Kibera, an informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya. Most residents in the community do not have access to indoor plumbing, so a local organization provided free water to help prevent the spread of coronavirus by helping people maintain their personal hygiene.

An Istanbul city employee disinfects the streets of Beyoglu on April 14, 2020. Typically bustling with tourists intent on sampling its historic winehouses, museums, nightclubs and shops, the neighborhood fell quiet at the start of the pandemic. Many cities initially tried   to curb the spread of the coronavirus by spraying their walkways with disinfectant—a practice that the World Health Organization ultimately recommended against , as the chemicals were likely to harm people’s health.

Migrants climb onto a truck which will take them toward their village on the outskirts of Lucknow, India, on May 6, 2020. When the Indian government announced a nationwide lockdown on March 24, it requested that people stay put, wherever they were. But that created a shortage of food for the huge migrant population in cities—so, after much deliberation and implementation of new public safety measures, state governments coordinated efforts to transport the migrants to their homes on special trains.

Students resume in-person classes at Elementary School No. 1 in Jakarta, Indonesia. More than 600 schools across the city reopened on a limited basis in fall 2021, offering face-to-face classes three days a week with strict health protocols in place. Schools also restricted the number of students who could attend in person, with half of each class still learning from home via video conference. Nadiem Makarim, the Indonesian minister of education, pushed for a return to classrooms, telling parliament that COVID-19 lockdowns caused “learning losses that have permanent impacts.”

In a Pétion-Ville high school, a student distributes handmade masks to his classmates before classes begin. The pandemic disrupted education for children everywhere—but the crisis was particularly dire in Haiti, where students have also suffered gaps in their education as a result of social unrest and natural disasters. The Caribbean nation reopened many of its schools in August 2020 with public health measures like masking in place.

Aspiring insurance agents sit for their qualification exams at desks spread apart on a soccer field in South Korea on April 25, 2020. The Korea Life Insurance Association and the General Insurance Association of Korea were among the many public and private institutions that introduced socially distanced exams during the pandemic. It was a very windy day, but more than 18,000 people across Korea took the insurance agent exam—happy that they had resumed after a hiatus of more than two months.

Eighteen-year-old Stephen Onyango (center) teaches his brothers Collins and Gavan while their sister Genevieve Akinyi watches at their home in Kibera. They hadn't been to class since the Kenyan government closed all schools in the country in mid-March to curb the spread of COVID-19. Stephen told photographer Brian Otieno that his teacher suggested an app he could use to teach his siblings. “It's my responsibility to ensure that my brothers are at home studying now that coronavirus is here with us and we don't know when this will end,” he said. Kenya reopened schools in January 2021, even as the pandemic continued to spread.

Members of the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity gather for an impromptu step dance after Howard University's commencement ceremony in Washington, D.C., on May 8, 2021. Only undergraduate students were allowed to attend the outdoor, in-person ceremony held at the university’s stadium. Friends and family scattered around outside of the stadium instead.  

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“As I was bouncing around campus, I started to think about how much the students had been through the past year and how this particular moment must feel for them,” said photographer Jared Soares. “To be able to witness the students' jubilation was a huge privilege, and even more meaningful based on the circumstances that we as a community had to endure the past year and a half.”

Seoulites lounge on picnic mats in the grass at Ttukseom Hangang Park on a late summer weekend in 2021. Located under ring-shaped entry and exit ramps leading to a bridge and an expressway, the park is a popular gathering spot for young and old alike.

Nadia, one of the hosts of the talent quest TV show Afghan Star , interviews masked young women at a taping on February 18, 2021. As the Taliban moved to retake national control, Afghan Star ’s cast and crew came under serious threat—judges and participants had to stay at a safe house with armed security guards and blast walls until the end of the season. Kabul fell to the Taliban six months after this photograph was taken, leaving an uncertain future for Afghan women .

Berlin partygoers share a moment In a hallway of the Ritter Butzke, a venerable electronic music clubs, on August 28, 2021. Recently government-designated a German cultural institution, the Ritter Butzke—like other clubs with open air spaces— was approved last summer for public reopening . Some pandemic rules still apply: signs at the club urge patrons to wear masks and refrain from drinking on the dance floor.

Members of the Orquesta Sinfónica Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho play music from their new album, Sinfonía Desordenada (Disorderly Symphony), during an open-air performance on November 12, 2021 in Caracas, Venezuela. The album was recorded during the pandemic lockdown by 75 musicians who blended elements of classical music with Afro-Caribbean rhythms.

A boy flies his kite during lockdown in Amman, Jordan, in April 2020. For a few days in March, the government had imposed even tighter restrictions—shutting down nearly everything and instituting a 24-hour curfew backed up by tanks and army trucks, with no exceptions even to get food and medicine.  

Amman is built on hills, and from his kitchen, photographer Moises Saman could hear the echoes of citywide sirens, the kind used for air raid warnings. He stayed inside with his family until the curfews began to ease. Then he went to find the places where refugees live, including the neighborhood where this photograph was taken. Despite fears that their crowded settlements and neighborhoods would lead to uncontainable spread of COVID-19, Jordan's strict lockdown kept the pandemic at bay during its early months. But as lockdown measures eased, cases began to surge by the fall —a warning to all countries to remain vigilant.

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Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus

Artists, novelists, critics, and essayists are writing the first draft of history.

by Alissa Wilkinson

The world is grappling with an invisible, deadly enemy, trying to understand how to live with the threat posed by a virus . For some writers, the only way forward is to put pen to paper, trying to conceptualize and document what it feels like to continue living as countries are under lockdown and regular life seems to have ground to a halt.

So as the coronavirus pandemic has stretched around the world, it’s sparked a crop of diary entries and essays that describe how life has changed. Novelists, critics, artists, and journalists have put words to the feelings many are experiencing. The result is a first draft of how we’ll someday remember this time, filled with uncertainty and pain and fear as well as small moments of hope and humanity.

• The Vox guide to navigating the coronavirus crisis

At the New York Review of Books, Ali Bhutto writes that in Karachi, Pakistan, the government-imposed curfew due to the virus is “eerily reminiscent of past military clampdowns”:

Beneath the quiet calm lies a sense that society has been unhinged and that the usual rules no longer apply. Small groups of pedestrians look on from the shadows, like an audience watching a spectacle slowly unfolding. People pause on street corners and in the shade of trees, under the watchful gaze of the paramilitary forces and the police.

His essay concludes with the sobering note that “in the minds of many, Covid-19 is just another life-threatening hazard in a city that stumbles from one crisis to another.”

Writing from Chattanooga, novelist Jamie Quatro documents the mixed ways her neighbors have been responding to the threat, and the frustration of conflicting direction, or no direction at all, from local, state, and federal leaders:

Whiplash, trying to keep up with who’s ordering what. We’re already experiencing enough chaos without this back-and-forth. Why didn’t the federal government issue a nationwide shelter-in-place at the get-go, the way other countries did? What happens when one state’s shelter-in-place ends, while others continue? Do states still under quarantine close their borders? We are still one nation, not fifty individual countries. Right?

• A syllabus for the end of the world

Award-winning photojournalist Alessio Mamo, quarantined with his partner Marta in Sicily after she tested positive for the virus, accompanies his photographs in the Guardian of their confinement with a reflection on being confined :

The doctors asked me to take a second test, but again I tested negative. Perhaps I’m immune? The days dragged on in my apartment, in black and white, like my photos. Sometimes we tried to smile, imagining that I was asymptomatic, because I was the virus. Our smiles seemed to bring good news. My mother left hospital, but I won’t be able to see her for weeks. Marta started breathing well again, and so did I. I would have liked to photograph my country in the midst of this emergency, the battles that the doctors wage on the frontline, the hospitals pushed to their limits, Italy on its knees fighting an invisible enemy. That enemy, a day in March, knocked on my door instead.

In the New York Times Magazine, deputy editor Jessica Lustig writes with devastating clarity about her family’s life in Brooklyn while her husband battled the virus, weeks before most people began taking the threat seriously:

At the door of the clinic, we stand looking out at two older women chatting outside the doorway, oblivious. Do I wave them away? Call out that they should get far away, go home, wash their hands, stay inside? Instead we just stand there, awkwardly, until they move on. Only then do we step outside to begin the long three-block walk home. I point out the early magnolia, the forsythia. T says he is cold. The untrimmed hairs on his neck, under his beard, are white. The few people walking past us on the sidewalk don’t know that we are visitors from the future. A vision, a premonition, a walking visitation. This will be them: Either T, in the mask, or — if they’re lucky — me, tending to him.

Essayist Leslie Jamison writes in the New York Review of Books about being shut away alone in her New York City apartment with her 2-year-old daughter since she became sick:

The virus. Its sinewy, intimate name. What does it feel like in my body today? Shivering under blankets. A hot itch behind the eyes. Three sweatshirts in the middle of the day. My daughter trying to pull another blanket over my body with her tiny arms. An ache in the muscles that somehow makes it hard to lie still. This loss of taste has become a kind of sensory quarantine. It’s as if the quarantine keeps inching closer and closer to my insides. First I lost the touch of other bodies; then I lost the air; now I’ve lost the taste of bananas. Nothing about any of these losses is particularly unique. I’ve made a schedule so I won’t go insane with the toddler. Five days ago, I wrote Walk/Adventure! on it, next to a cut-out illustration of a tiger—as if we’d see tigers on our walks. It was good to keep possibility alive.

At Literary Hub, novelist Heidi Pitlor writes about the elastic nature of time during her family’s quarantine in Massachusetts:

During a shutdown, the things that mark our days—commuting to work, sending our kids to school, having a drink with friends—vanish and time takes on a flat, seamless quality. Without some self-imposed structure, it’s easy to feel a little untethered. A friend recently posted on Facebook: “For those who have lost track, today is Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay.” ... Giving shape to time is especially important now, when the future is so shapeless. We do not know whether the virus will continue to rage for weeks or months or, lord help us, on and off for years. We do not know when we will feel safe again. And so many of us, minus those who are gifted at compartmentalization or denial, remain largely captive to fear. We may stay this way if we do not create at least the illusion of movement in our lives, our long days spent with ourselves or partners or families.

• What day is it today?

Novelist Lauren Groff writes at the New York Review of Books about trying to escape the prison of her fears while sequestered at home in Gainesville, Florida:

Some people have imaginations sparked only by what they can see; I blame this blinkered empiricism for the parks overwhelmed with people, the bars, until a few nights ago, thickly thronged. My imagination is the opposite. I fear everything invisible to me. From the enclosure of my house, I am afraid of the suffering that isn’t present before me, the people running out of money and food or drowning in the fluid in their lungs, the deaths of health-care workers now growing ill while performing their duties. I fear the federal government, which the right wing has so—intentionally—weakened that not only is it insufficient to help its people, it is actively standing in help’s way. I fear we won’t sufficiently punish the right. I fear leaving the house and spreading the disease. I fear what this time of fear is doing to my children, their imaginations, and their souls.

At ArtForum , Berlin-based critic and writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen reflects on martinis, melancholia, and Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo’s 2018 graphic novel Retreat , in which three young people exile themselves in the woods:

In melancholia, the shape of what is ending, and its temporality, is sprawling and incomprehensible. The ambivalence makes it hard to bear. The world of Retreat is rendered in lush pink and purple watercolors, which dissolve into wild and messy abstractions. In apocalypse, the divisions established in genesis bleed back out. My own Corona-retreat is similarly soft, color-field like, each day a blurred succession of quarantinis, YouTube–yoga, and televized press conferences. As restrictions mount, so does abstraction. For now, I’m still rooting for love to save the world.

At the Paris Review , Matt Levin writes about reading Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves during quarantine:

A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness—they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand. It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine—a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day’s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway—it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption.

• Vox is starting a book club. Come read with us!

In an essay for the Financial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy writes with anger about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anemic response to the threat, but also offers a glimmer of hope for the future:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

From Boston, Nora Caplan-Bricker writes in The Point about the strange contraction of space under quarantine, in which a friend in Beirut is as close as the one around the corner in the same city:

It’s a nice illusion—nice to feel like we’re in it together, even if my real world has shrunk to one person, my husband, who sits with his laptop in the other room. It’s nice in the same way as reading those essays that reframe social distancing as solidarity. “We must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don’t do is also brilliant and full of love,” the poet Anne Boyer wrote on March 10th, the day that Massachusetts declared a state of emergency. If you squint, you could almost make sense of this quarantine as an effort to flatten, along with the curve, the distinctions we make between our bonds with others. Right now, I care for my neighbor in the same way I demonstrate love for my mother: in all instances, I stay away. And in moments this month, I have loved strangers with an intensity that is new to me. On March 14th, the Saturday night after the end of life as we knew it, I went out with my dog and found the street silent: no lines for restaurants, no children on bicycles, no couples strolling with little cups of ice cream. It had taken the combined will of thousands of people to deliver such a sudden and complete emptiness. I felt so grateful, and so bereft.

And on his own website, musician and artist David Byrne writes about rediscovering the value of working for collective good , saying that “what is happening now is an opportunity to learn how to change our behavior”:

In emergencies, citizens can suddenly cooperate and collaborate. Change can happen. We’re going to need to work together as the effects of climate change ramp up. In order for capitalism to survive in any form, we will have to be a little more socialist. Here is an opportunity for us to see things differently — to see that we really are all connected — and adjust our behavior accordingly. Are we willing to do this? Is this moment an opportunity to see how truly interdependent we all are? To live in a world that is different and better than the one we live in now? We might be too far down the road to test every asymptomatic person, but a change in our mindsets, in how we view our neighbors, could lay the groundwork for the collective action we’ll need to deal with other global crises. The time to see how connected we all are is now.

The portrait these writers paint of a world under quarantine is multifaceted. Our worlds have contracted to the confines of our homes, and yet in some ways we’re more connected than ever to one another. We feel fear and boredom, anger and gratitude, frustration and strange peace. Uncertainty drives us to find metaphors and images that will let us wrap our minds around what is happening.

Yet there’s no single “what” that is happening. Everyone is contending with the pandemic and its effects from different places and in different ways. Reading others’ experiences — even the most frightening ones — can help alleviate the loneliness and dread, a little, and remind us that what we’re going through is both unique and shared by all.

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Coronavirus: The world has come together to flatten the curve. Can we stay united to tackle other crises?

Watching the world come together gives me hope for the future, writes mira patel, a high school junior..

Mira Patel and her sister Veda. (Courtesy of Dee Patel)

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Before the pandemic, I had often heard adults say that young people would lose the ability to connect in-person with others due to our growing dependence on technology and social media. However, this stay-at-home experience has proven to me that our elders’ worry is unnecessary. Because isolation isn’t in human nature, and no advancement in technology could replace our need to meet in person, especially when it comes to learning.

As the weather gets warmer and we approach summertime, it’s going to be more and more tempting for us teenagers to go out and do what we have always done: hang out and have fun. Even though the decision-makers are adults, everyone has a role to play and we teens can help the world move forward by continuing to self-isolate. It’s incredibly important that in the coming weeks, we respect the government’s effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

In the meantime, we can find creative ways to stay connected and continue to do what we love. Personally, I see many 6-feet-apart bike rides and Zoom calls in my future.

If there is anything that this pandemic has made me realize, it’s how connected we all are. At first, the infamous coronavirus seemed to be a problem in China, which is worlds away. But slowly, it steadily made its way through various countries in Europe, and inevitably reached us in America. What was once framed as a foreign virus has now hit home.

Watching the global community come together, gives me hope, as a teenager, that in the future we can use this cooperation to combat climate change and other catastrophes.

As COVID-19 continues to creep its way into each of our communities and impact the way we live and communicate, I find solace in the fact that we face what comes next together, as humanity.

When the day comes that my generation is responsible for dealing with another crisis, I hope we can use this experience to remind us that moving forward requires a joint effort.

Mira Patel is a junior at Strath Haven High School and is an education intern at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Follow her on Instagram here.  

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• PHOTO ESSAYS

About the Photo Essays

When everyone is consumed by just one conversation, some voices struggle to be heard. Often these belong to the most vulnerable people in the world, hit hardest by the severity of the pandemic. Our world-class journalists have expertise in telling their stories.

The United States has been decimated by the crisis. We’ll be bringing you a series of five photo essays over the next three months, each shining a spotlight on different themes and different states.

PHOTOGRAPHER Michael A. McCoy

I like to think of myself as a storyteller through photography and my camera lens offers a concrete expression that will transcend time. My passion for photography came in my early years and has allowed me to identify and navigate the subtle nuances that make each person unique. Catching them at just the right moment produces exquisite works of art that will be cherished forever. My photographs have been described as engaging, affectionate, insightful and alluring.

My entire life has been dominated by my passion for photography. From the minute I picked up a camera, I was captivated. I love telling the story about the relationships between individuals; capturing those special moments of joy and contentment. Whether it’s a family portrait, a wedding, or a special event, I like to capture the “in-between” moments that are the most candid and authentic.

PHOTOGRAPHER Lynsey Weatherspoon

Lynsey Weatherspoon is a portrait and editorial photographer based in both Atlanta and Birmingham. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, NPR, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Time, ESPN and ESPN-owned The Undefeated. The fingerprint of heritage can be found on assignments and personal projects featuring Black Lives Matter, Gullah Geechee culture, unsung players in the Negro Baseball League, and the last of dying breed – a shoe cobbler. Her work has been exhibited at The African American Museum in Philadelphia and Photoville NYC. She is an awardee, The Lit List, 2018. Her affiliations include Diversify Photo, Authority Collective, and Women Photograph.

PHOTOGRAPHER L. Kasimu Harris

L. Kasimu Harris is a New Orleans-based artist whose practice deposits a number of different strategic and conceptual devices in order to push narratives. He strives to tell stories of underrepresented communities in New Orleans and beyond. Harris has shown in numerous group exhibitions across the US and two international exhibitions and has had five solo photography exhibitions. In 2018, his War on the Benighted series was a part of Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories, a group exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Harris’s feature for Edible New Orleans was selected for the book Best Food Writing 2016 and earlier this year, his writing and photographs were featured in ” A Shot Before Last Call: Capturing New Orleans’s Vanishing Black Bars” that was published in The New York Times.

Currently, Harris is among 60 artists selected nationwide for State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and has a solo exhibition, Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges: Photographs by L. Kasimu Harris at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh. His work is also in group exhibitions at the Ford Foundation Gallery and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Harris earned a BBA in Entrepreneurship from Middle Tennessee State University and an MA in Journalism from the University of Mississippi. He is on the Board of Trustees at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Harris was a 2018 Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and is a 2020 Joan Mitchell Center Artist-in-Residence.

About the Photographers

Michael a. mccoy, lynsey weatherspoon, l. kasimu harris, the photo essays.

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• PHOTO COMPETITION

I Thought We’d Learned Nothing From the Pandemic. I Wasn’t Seeing the Full Picture

M y first home had a back door that opened to a concrete patio with a giant crack down the middle. When my sister and I played, I made sure to stay on the same side of the divide as her, just in case. The 1988 film The Land Before Time was one of the first movies I ever saw, and the image of the earth splintering into pieces planted its roots in my brain. I believed that, even in my own backyard, I could easily become the tiny Triceratops separated from her family, on the other side of the chasm, as everything crumbled into chaos.

Some 30 years later, I marvel at the eerie, unexpected ways that cartoonish nightmare came to life – not just for me and my family, but for all of us. The landscape was already covered in fissures well before COVID-19 made its way across the planet, but the pandemic applied pressure, and the cracks broke wide open, separating us from each other physically and ideologically. Under the weight of the crisis, we scattered and landed on such different patches of earth we could barely see each other’s faces, even when we squinted. We disagreed viciously with each other, about how to respond, but also about what was true.

Recently, someone asked me if we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, and my first thought was a flat no. Nothing. There was a time when I thought it would be the very thing to draw us together and catapult us – as a capital “S” Society – into a kinder future. It’s surreal to remember those early days when people rallied together, sewing masks for health care workers during critical shortages and gathering on balconies in cities from Dallas to New York City to clap and sing songs like “Yellow Submarine.” It felt like a giant lightning bolt shot across the sky, and for one breath, we all saw something that had been hidden in the dark – the inherent vulnerability in being human or maybe our inescapable connectedness .

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But it turns out, it was just a flash. The goodwill vanished as quickly as it appeared. A couple of years later, people feel lied to, abandoned, and all on their own. I’ve felt my own curiosity shrinking, my willingness to reach out waning , my ability to keep my hands open dwindling. I look out across the landscape and see selfishness and rage, burnt earth and so many dead bodies. Game over. We lost. And if we’ve already lost, why try?

Still, the question kept nagging me. I wondered, am I seeing the full picture? What happens when we focus not on the collective society but at one face, one story at a time? I’m not asking for a bow to minimize the suffering – a pretty flourish to put on top and make the whole thing “worth it.” Yuck. That’s not what we need. But I wondered about deep, quiet growth. The kind we feel in our bodies, relationships, homes, places of work, neighborhoods.

Like a walkie-talkie message sent to my allies on the ground, I posted a call on my Instagram. What do you see? What do you hear? What feels possible? Is there life out here? Sprouting up among the rubble? I heard human voices calling back – reports of life, personal and specific. I heard one story at a time – stories of grief and distrust, fury and disappointment. Also gratitude. Discovery. Determination.

Among the most prevalent were the stories of self-revelation. Almost as if machines were given the chance to live as humans, people described blossoming into fuller selves. They listened to their bodies’ cues, recognized their desires and comforts, tuned into their gut instincts, and honored the intuition they hadn’t realized belonged to them. Alex, a writer and fellow disabled parent, found the freedom to explore a fuller version of herself in the privacy the pandemic provided. “The way I dress, the way I love, and the way I carry myself have both shrunk and expanded,” she shared. “I don’t love myself very well with an audience.” Without the daily ritual of trying to pass as “normal” in public, Tamar, a queer mom in the Netherlands, realized she’s autistic. “I think the pandemic helped me to recognize the mask,” she wrote. “Not that unmasking is easy now. But at least I know it’s there.” In a time of widespread suffering that none of us could solve on our own, many tended to our internal wounds and misalignments, large and small, and found clarity.

Read More: A Tool for Staying Grounded in This Era of Constant Uncertainty

I wonder if this flourishing of self-awareness is at least partially responsible for the life alterations people pursued. The pandemic broke open our personal notions of work and pushed us to reevaluate things like time and money. Lucy, a disabled writer in the U.K., made the hard decision to leave her job as a journalist covering Westminster to write freelance about her beloved disability community. “This work feels important in a way nothing else has ever felt,” she wrote. “I don’t think I’d have realized this was what I should be doing without the pandemic.” And she wasn’t alone – many people changed jobs , moved, learned new skills and hobbies, became politically engaged.

Perhaps more than any other shifts, people described a significant reassessment of their relationships. They set boundaries, said no, had challenging conversations. They also reconnected, fell in love, and learned to trust. Jeanne, a quilter in Indiana, got to know relatives she wouldn’t have connected with if lockdowns hadn’t prompted weekly family Zooms. “We are all over the map as regards to our belief systems,” she emphasized, “but it is possible to love people you don’t see eye to eye with on every issue.” Anna, an anti-violence advocate in Maine, learned she could trust her new marriage: “Life was not a honeymoon. But we still chose to turn to each other with kindness and curiosity.” So many bonds forged and broken, strengthened and strained.

Instead of relying on default relationships or institutional structures, widespread recalibrations allowed for going off script and fortifying smaller communities. Mara from Idyllwild, Calif., described the tangible plan for care enacted in her town. “We started a mutual-aid group at the beginning of the pandemic,” she wrote, “and it grew so quickly before we knew it we were feeding 400 of the 4000 residents.” She didn’t pretend the conditions were ideal. In fact, she expressed immense frustration with our collective response to the pandemic. Even so, the local group rallied and continues to offer assistance to their community with help from donations and volunteers (many of whom were originally on the receiving end of support). “I’ve learned that people thrive when they feel their connection to others,” she wrote. Clare, a teacher from the U.K., voiced similar conviction as she described a giant scarf she’s woven out of ribbons, each representing a single person. The scarf is “a collection of stories, moments and wisdom we are sharing with each other,” she wrote. It now stretches well over 1,000 feet.

A few hours into reading the comments, I lay back on my bed, phone held against my chest. The room was quiet, but my internal world was lighting up with firefly flickers. What felt different? Surely part of it was receiving personal accounts of deep-rooted growth. And also, there was something to the mere act of asking and listening. Maybe it connected me to humans before battle cries. Maybe it was the chance to be in conversation with others who were also trying to understand – what is happening to us? Underneath it all, an undeniable thread remained; I saw people peering into the mess and narrating their findings onto the shared frequency. Every comment was like a flare into the sky. I’m here! And if the sky is full of flares, we aren’t alone.

I recognized my own pandemic discoveries – some minor, others massive. Like washing off thick eyeliner and mascara every night is more effort than it’s worth; I can transform the mundane into the magical with a bedsheet, a movie projector, and twinkle lights; my paralyzed body can mother an infant in ways I’d never seen modeled for me. I remembered disappointing, bewildering conversations within my own family of origin and our imperfect attempts to remain close while also seeing things so differently. I realized that every time I get the weekly invite to my virtual “Find the Mumsies” call, with a tiny group of moms living hundreds of miles apart, I’m being welcomed into a pocket of unexpected community. Even though we’ve never been in one room all together, I’ve felt an uncommon kind of solace in their now-familiar faces.

Hope is a slippery thing. I desperately want to hold onto it, but everywhere I look there are real, weighty reasons to despair. The pandemic marks a stretch on the timeline that tangles with a teetering democracy, a deteriorating planet , the loss of human rights that once felt unshakable . When the world is falling apart Land Before Time style, it can feel trite, sniffing out the beauty – useless, firing off flares to anyone looking for signs of life. But, while I’m under no delusions that if we just keep trudging forward we’ll find our own oasis of waterfalls and grassy meadows glistening in the sunshine beneath a heavenly chorus, I wonder if trivializing small acts of beauty, connection, and hope actually cuts us off from resources essential to our survival. The group of abandoned dinosaurs were keeping each other alive and making each other laugh well before they made it to their fantasy ending.

Read More: How Ice Cream Became My Own Personal Act of Resistance

After the monarch butterfly went on the endangered-species list, my friend and fellow writer Hannah Soyer sent me wildflower seeds to plant in my yard. A simple act of big hope – that I will actually plant them, that they will grow, that a monarch butterfly will receive nourishment from whatever blossoms are able to push their way through the dirt. There are so many ways that could fail. But maybe the outcome wasn’t exactly the point. Maybe hope is the dogged insistence – the stubborn defiance – to continue cultivating moments of beauty regardless. There is value in the planting apart from the harvest.

I can’t point out a single collective lesson from the pandemic. It’s hard to see any great “we.” Still, I see the faces in my moms’ group, making pancakes for their kids and popping on between strings of meetings while we try to figure out how to raise these small people in this chaotic world. I think of my friends on Instagram tending to the selves they discovered when no one was watching and the scarf of ribbons stretching the length of more than three football fields. I remember my family of three, holding hands on the way up the ramp to the library. These bits of growth and rings of support might not be loud or right on the surface, but that’s not the same thing as nothing. If we only cared about the bottom-line defeats or sweeping successes of the big picture, we’d never plant flowers at all.

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Photo Essay Captures How COVID-19 Has Transformed BU

A darkened hallway in the College of Arts & Sciences, March 18. BU buildings have been largely vacant since the University moved all teaching and learning remotely on March 16 in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Photo by Cydney Scott

Images document the subtle—and not so subtle—ways the pandemic has altered campus

Bu today staff.

From the moment the University announced that starting March 16 it was moving to remote teaching and learning for the rest of the spring semester, then shuttered residences for most students as of March 22, BU campuses took on a startlingly different look, transformed overnight from bustling metropolises to a series of largely empty interior and exterior landscapes. 

Staff photojournalists Cydney Scott and Jackie Ricciardi have continued to photograph the campuses since the pandemic caused the city of Boston to limit the normal operations of businesses, even as most students have returned home and most faculty and staff are working remotely.

“As a photographer for BU Today, the biggest danger I usually face at work is whether or not I’ll squeeze into a spot on the BU shuttle on my way to an assignment on a rainy day,” Scott says. “Photographing Comm Ave during the midst of a pandemic brings risks of a different, more frightening order.” The two maintain a safe social distance when shooting their subjects—which brings new challenges. “Where I would typically move around during a shoot, being a ‘fly on the wall,’ my movement now is largely limited,” she says.

“Photographing during the pandemic has been a struggle for me,” says Ricciardi. “As a photojournalist, my goal is to capture human connection, and I wonder how I can do that successfully when the streets are empty and we’re told we must stay away from people…yet one of the most significant  events in history is happening in my lifetime and it’s my responsibility to try and capture that.”

Their images will serve to chronicle this moment in history for years to come.

Meredith Siegel (left) and Rachel Reiser, both Questrom assistant deans, practice social distancing while prepping for a “dean’s huddle” meeting via Zoom on March 16. Photo by Cydney Scott

A sign posted outside the College of Communication  student lounge March 16. Photo by Cydney Scott

Bruno Rubio, a College of Arts & Sciences master lecturer in chemistry, holding remote office hours in a Metcalf Science Center lecture hall March 17. “I was old-school with my teaching,” says Rubio, “My clinging to traditional methods of learning and teaching? I’m paying for it now!” In fact, he mastered Zoom quickly and was able to assist the eight students who needed help that day. Photo by Cydney Scott

An eerily empty FitRec basketball court on March 17. FitRec closed that day. Photo by Cydney Scott

Paradise Rock Club assistant production manager Will Powell posting an encouraging message on the club’s marquee March 17. The Paradise is closed indefinitely because of the coronavirus pandemic, like all the commonwealth’s bars, restaurants, and entertainment spots. Photo by Cydney Scott

COM staff members on video screens in the school’s Zimmerman Social Media Activation Center during a Zoom meeting March 17. Photo by Cydney Scott

BU custodian Grace Araujo at work at StuVi I on March 17. BU’s custodial staff continues to clean and maintain BU’s 300 buildings during the pandemic. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi

Victory Innovations battery-operated electrostatic spray guns are prized by custodial workers for their deep cleaning ability. BU invested in about 20 of the spray guns, which are in such high demand now that they are almost impossible to get. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi

The first day of remote learning: a lone student studying at Mugar Memorial Library on March 16. The library is now closed to students, but staff continue to provide support and services remotely. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi

Entering the George Sherman Union on March 16 (left) and finding it almost empty on March 18 (right) must have been surreal experiences. Fewer than 450 students remain in BU housing at present. Photos by Jackie Ricciardi (left) and Cydney Scott (right)

Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, dean of Marsh Chapel, on his way to the chapel’s first virtual Sunday service on March 22. The eight choral scholars on the altar are six feet apart during the service. Photos by Cydney Scott 

A triage tent for intake of potential coronavirus patients set up outside Boston Medical Center March 20. BMC nurses Marisa McIntyre (left) and Maureen Shanahan-Frappie are among staff there who assess patients’ symptoms and determine whether they should be sent to BMC’s influenza-like illness clinic (ILI) for moderate symptoms or to the Emergency Department for more serious conditions. COVID-19 testing is done at both. Photo by Cydney Scott

Except for exceptional cases, most students living on campus had to be out of their rooms by March 22. Xing Hu (CAS’22) (left) waits with Abin George (ENG’23) outside Claflin Hall to be picked up March 20. Photo by Cydney Scott

Goodbyes: Northeastern freshman Nadhur Prashant (left) with his girlfriend, Anindita Lal (CAS’23), on West Campus March 20.  Lal was returning  home to Acton, Mass., and Prashant was leaving Boston to go home to India. Photo by Cydney Scott

Bicycles and strewn moving carts in the courtyard between 722 and 726 Comm Ave on March 25, after dorms were shuttered. Photo by Cydney Scott

Millyan Phillips of Piece by Piece Moving Company empties a room on the Fenway Campus’ Riverway House March 27. Students who had left belongings behind when they went on spring break were able to use an app to specify items they wanted stored, saved, or thrown out. Photo by Cydney Scott

An abandoned Fenway Campus Center, bereft of its usual throngs of students, on April 15. The 150 Riverway building houses the campus dining hall and common student spaces as well as student residences. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi

A flyer reminding residents to maintain social distance guidelines, left on a Fenway Campus Center table. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi

Left photo: Quarantine kits lined up in the GSU Ballroom on April 15. The kits, containing two weeks’ worth of cleaning supplies, paper goods, pillows, linens, and nonperishable snacks and meals, were available to students quarantined on campus because of exposure to COVID-19. Right photo: Jennifer Skikas (left), GSU catering sales manager, and Joann Flores, catering manager for Questrom, load up some of the items to be delivered to empty quarantine rooms across campus on April 21. Photos by Cydney Scott

Lead custodian Carlos Carreiro (left) and custodian Andres Lopez deliver paper goods to empty quarantine rooms at 580 Comm Ave April 21. The University reserved approximately 50 rooms across campus for students who needed to be quarantined during the pandemic. Photo by Cydney Scott

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Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.

There are 7 comments on Photo Essay Captures How COVID-19 Has Transformed BU

Jackie and Cydney, wonderful yet weird campus shots. Thank you for being on site capturing this for us.

Thank you, Cydney and Jackie, for these images that capture so many elements of BU during this difficult time of grieving for the world, and caring for each other. You make us proud, even prouder, of BU people!

Thanks for Cydney and Jackie’s excellenct and memorable work with these capturing photos! my son is still in BU for his master degree study and will finish his study by May. Our family apprecaites all the work and effort by BU during this special and difficult period. We are proud my son is a student of BU!

Wow! Great images. Your photos tell a very moving story. You also managed to capture an image of my son studying in the library. He is the lone student at the Mugar Memorial Library. Can you please let me know how I can buy a copy of that image? Thank you.

Great work. Is there a way that I can get a copy Of one of the images. My son is in that photo.

Shoot me an email Dina and I’ll see what we can do. Cydney [email protected]

Fantastic photography & story, thank you for sharing! Our son never had the chance to return to BU after spring break, so to see what BU looks like now is very moving. Our family is grateful to all the BU staff, faculty & students and look forward to the day we can visit Boston again!

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Lessons From the Coronavirus Quarantine

Trapped inside a city apartment in Brazil, a traveler and nature photographer discovers what he values most.

By Augusto Gomes

7 Jul 2020 - 5 Minute Read

I’m writing this confined between four walls. Stuck at home in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, I’m able to see no more than a few plants in the garden and a piece of blue winter sky squeezed between the buildings through my window. But this window has been like a breath to me in the last months – my only connection to nature and to the external world. I go there every half hour just to watch the time go by and the magic of changing light.

As a nature-addicted biologist, traveler, mountaineer, and photographer, I must confess this situation has been kind of tricky for me. The COVID-19 pandemic and the seemingly endless quarantine are new to all of us. And it’s not an overstatement to say that it’s new for humankind too, at least in the last century.

In just three months, I was forced to cancel two dream trips: one to Monte Roraima, in the Tepuis of Venezuela, and another to Península Valdés , in Argentine Patagonia. I’ve had to reinvent my life, and find ways to survive and stay healthy – physically and mentally – during the quarantine. I wonder how many of us have had to completely change plans due to the pandemic?

Things have changed, and it’s a bit scary to imagine how the world we’ll now face will be different from the world we knew so far. But the pandemic and the social isolation have also taught me a lot of things. They disclosed the deep problems regarding uncontrolled consumerism, and also our mistakes in our relationships with nature, with other people, and even with ourselves. This unexpected enemy arose as a result of wildlife trade and consumption, but that was just the tip of iceberg. Our forests are vanishing at a desperately high rate and our oceans are full of plastic . We have amazing technology, our economies are growing, but even so, poverty and social injustice are increasing. What have we done with our only home? Why is the digital world splitting us apart, instead of joining us?

Among all these musings, one of the most important for me was thinking about how I spend my time. It goes by fast and doesn’t come back. Every second we spend angry, bored in front of a digital screen, or lost in something we don’t really want to be doing, is a second less to follow our dreams, to have new experiences, to stay with whom we wish to stay. 

Sitting like a trapped bird in my room, I’m remembering all the amazing experiences I’ve had traveling the world in the last few years. But I also remember the countless days or months I’ve lost on social media, or with superficial concerns and unfounded worries. Or, worst of all, how many great experiences I’ve missed just out of fear or laziness.

This is a hell of a life lesson. The quarantine is teaching me the value of freedom and the outdoor life. It’s throwing it my face.

Hopefully we will be able to see friends, rebuild our plans, and travel again soon. May this hard moment lead us to a more conscious state, more connected to the ones we love and to our outer and inner nature. May we build a more respectful relationship with our planet, our only home, and may we spend our lives doing what we love.

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Augusto is a Brazilian biologist, nature photographer, and environmental storyteller.

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Só temos a agradecer por nos mostrar com leveza e arte a beleza através das lentes. É preciso pureza de alma p revelar um mundo tão belo em meio a crise atual e vc o fez c muita poesia. Parabéns👏👏👏

Muito legal, real, e só fotão!!!

Resumiu tudo o que tenho sentido! E que fotos lindas! Viajar pelas minhas recordações de viagem tem sido meu acalanto e minha inspiração futura tmb! Belo texto! :-)

"Every second we spend angry, bored in front of a digital screen, or lost in something we don’t really want to be doing, is a second less to follow our dreams, to have new experiences, to stay with whom we wish to stay." And it hurts to be reminded of this feeling of being stunted, not moving forward. But it is a time for reflection as you so well pointed out.

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How to Write About the Impact of the Coronavirus in a College Essay

The global impact of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, means colleges and prospective students alike are in for an admissions cycle like no other. Both face unprecedented challenges and questions as they grapple with their respective futures amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic.

Colleges must examine applicants without the aid of standardized test scores for many -- a factor that prompted many schools to go test-optional for now . Even grades, a significant component of a college application, may be hard to interpret with some high schools adopting pass-fail classes last spring due to the pandemic. Major college admissions factors are suddenly skewed.

"I can't help but think other (admissions) factors are going to matter more," says Ethan Sawyer, founder of the College Essay Guy, a website that offers free and paid essay-writing resources.

College essays and letters of recommendation , Sawyer says, are likely to carry more weight than ever in this admissions cycle. And many essays will likely focus on how the pandemic shaped students' lives throughout an often tumultuous 2020.

[ Read: How to Write a College Essay. ]

But before writing a college essay focused on the coronavirus, students should explore whether it's the best topic for them.

Writing About COVID-19 for a College Application

Much of daily life has been colored by the coronavirus. Virtual learning is the norm at many colleges and high schools, many extracurriculars have vanished and social lives have stalled for students complying with measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.

"For some young people, the pandemic took away what they envisioned as their senior year," says Robert Alexander, dean of admissions, financial aid and enrollment management at the University of Rochester in New York. "Maybe that's a spot on a varsity athletic team or the lead role in the fall play. And it's OK for them to mourn what should have been and what they feel like they lost, but more important is how are they making the most of the opportunities they do have?"

That question, Alexander says, is what colleges want answered if students choose to address COVID-19 in their college essay.

But the question of whether a student should write about the coronavirus is tricky. The answer depends largely on the student.

"In general, I don't think students should write about COVID-19 in their main personal statement for their application," Robin Miller, master college admissions counselor at IvyWise, a college counseling company, wrote in an email.

"Certainly, there may be exceptions to this based on a student's individual experience, but since the personal essay is the main place in the application where the student can really allow their voice to be heard and share insight into who they are as an individual, there are likely many other topics they can choose to write about that are more distinctive and unique than COVID-19," Miller says.

[ Read: What Colleges Look for: 6 Ways to Stand Out. ]

Opinions among admissions experts vary on whether to write about the likely popular topic of the pandemic.

"If your essay communicates something positive, unique, and compelling about you in an interesting and eloquent way, go for it," Carolyn Pippen, principal college admissions counselor at IvyWise, wrote in an email. She adds that students shouldn't be dissuaded from writing about a topic merely because it's common, noting that "topics are bound to repeat, no matter how hard we try to avoid it."

Above all, she urges honesty.

"If your experience within the context of the pandemic has been truly unique, then write about that experience, and the standing out will take care of itself," Pippen says. "If your experience has been generally the same as most other students in your context, then trying to find a unique angle can easily cross the line into exploiting a tragedy, or at least appearing as though you have."

But focusing entirely on the pandemic can limit a student to a single story and narrow who they are in an application, Sawyer says. "There are so many wonderful possibilities for what you can say about yourself outside of your experience within the pandemic."

He notes that passions, strengths, career interests and personal identity are among the multitude of essay topic options available to applicants and encourages them to probe their values to help determine the topic that matters most to them -- and write about it.

That doesn't mean the pandemic experience has to be ignored if applicants feel the need to write about it.

Writing About Coronavirus in Main and Supplemental Essays

Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form.

To help students explain how the pandemic affected them, The Common App has added an optional section to address this topic. Applicants have 250 words to describe their pandemic experience and the personal and academic impact of COVID-19.

[ Read: The Common App: Everything You Need to Know. ]

"That's not a trick question, and there's no right or wrong answer," Alexander says. Colleges want to know, he adds, how students navigated the pandemic, how they prioritized their time, what responsibilities they took on and what they learned along the way.

If students can distill all of the above information into 250 words, there's likely no need to write about it in a full-length college essay, experts say. And applicants whose lives were not heavily altered by the pandemic may even choose to skip the optional COVID-19 question.

"This space is best used to discuss hardship and/or significant challenges that the student and/or the student's family experienced as a result of COVID-19 and how they have responded to those difficulties," Miller notes. Using the section to acknowledge a lack of impact, she adds, "could be perceived as trite and lacking insight, despite the good intentions of the applicant."

To guard against this lack of awareness, Sawyer encourages students to tap someone they trust to review their writing , whether it's the 250-word Common App response or the full-length essay.

Experts tend to agree that the short-form approach to this as an essay topic works better, but there are exceptions. And if a student does have a coronavirus story that he or she feels must be told, Alexander encourages the writer to be authentic in the essay.

"My advice for an essay about COVID-19 is the same as my advice about an essay for any topic -- and that is, don't write what you think we want to read or hear," Alexander says. "Write what really changed you and that story that now is yours and yours alone to tell."

Sawyer urges students to ask themselves, "What's the sentence that only I can write?" He also encourages students to remember that the pandemic is only a chapter of their lives and not the whole book.

Miller, who cautions against writing a full-length essay on the coronavirus, says that if students choose to do so they should have a conversation with their high school counselor about whether that's the right move. And if students choose to proceed with COVID-19 as a topic, she says they need to be clear, detailed and insightful about what they learned and how they adapted along the way.

"Approaching the essay in this manner will provide important balance while demonstrating personal growth and vulnerability," Miller says.

Pippen encourages students to remember that they are in an unprecedented time for college admissions.

"It is important to keep in mind with all of these (admission) factors that no colleges have ever had to consider them this way in the selection process, if at all," Pippen says. "They have had very little time to calibrate their evaluations of different application components within their offices, let alone across institutions. This means that colleges will all be handling the admissions process a little bit differently, and their approaches may even evolve over the course of the admissions cycle."

Searching for a college? Get our complete rankings of Best Colleges.

Writing about COVID-19 in a college admission essay

by: Venkates Swaminathan | Updated: September 14, 2020

Print article

For students applying to college using the CommonApp, there are several different places where students and counselors can address the pandemic’s impact. The different sections have differing goals. You must understand how to use each section for its appropriate use.

The CommonApp COVID-19 question

First, the CommonApp this year has an additional question specifically about COVID-19 :

Community disruptions such as COVID-19 and natural disasters can have deep and long-lasting impacts. If you need it, this space is yours to describe those impacts. Colleges care about the effects on your health and well-being, safety, family circumstances, future plans, and education, including access to reliable technology and quiet study spaces. Please use this space to describe how these events have impacted you.

This question seeks to understand the adversity that students may have had to face due to the pandemic, the move to online education, or the shelter-in-place rules. You don’t have to answer this question if the impact on you wasn’t particularly severe. Some examples of things students should discuss include:

• The student or a family member had COVID-19 or suffered other illnesses due to confinement during the pandemic.
• The candidate had to deal with personal or family issues, such as abusive living situations or other safety concerns
• The student suffered from a lack of internet access and other online learning challenges.
• Students who dealt with problems registering for or taking standardized tests and AP exams.

Jeff Schiffman of the Tulane University admissions office has a blog about this section. He recommends students ask themselves several questions as they go about answering this section:

• Are my experiences different from others’?
• Are there noticeable changes on my transcript?
• Am I aware of my privilege?
• Am I specific? Am I explaining rather than complaining?
• Is this information being included elsewhere on my application?

If you do answer this section, be brief and to-the-point.

Counselor recommendations and school profiles

Second, counselors will, in their counselor forms and school profiles on the CommonApp, address how the school handled the pandemic and how it might have affected students, specifically as it relates to:

• Grading scales and policies
• Graduation requirements
• Instructional methods
• Schedules and course offerings
• Testing requirements
• Your academic calendar
• Other extenuating circumstances

Students don’t have to mention these matters in their application unless something unusual happened.

Writing about COVID-19 in your main essay

Write about your experiences during the pandemic in your main college essay if your experience is personal, relevant, and the most important thing to discuss in your college admission essay. That you had to stay home and study online isn’t sufficient, as millions of other students faced the same situation. But sometimes, it can be appropriate and helpful to write about something related to the pandemic in your essay. For example:

• One student developed a website for a local comic book store. The store might not have survived without the ability for people to order comic books online. The student had a long-standing relationship with the store, and it was an institution that created a community for students who otherwise felt left out.
• One student started a YouTube channel to help other students with academic subjects he was very familiar with and began tutoring others.
• Some students used their extra time that was the result of the stay-at-home orders to take online courses pursuing topics they are genuinely interested in or developing new interests, like a foreign language or music.

Experiences like this can be good topics for the CommonApp essay as long as they reflect something genuinely important about the student. For many students whose lives have been shaped by this pandemic, it can be a critical part of their college application.

Want more? Read 6 ways to improve a college essay , What the &%$! should I write about in my college essay , and Just how important is a college admissions essay? .

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12 Ideas for Writing Through the Pandemic With The New York Times

A dozen writing projects — including journals, poems, comics and more — for students to try at home.

By Natalie Proulx

The coronavirus has transformed life as we know it. Schools are closed, we’re confined to our homes and the future feels very uncertain. Why write at a time like this?

For one, we are living through history. Future historians may look back on the journals, essays and art that ordinary people are creating now to tell the story of life during the coronavirus.

But writing can also be deeply therapeutic. It can be a way to express our fears, hopes and joys. It can help us make sense of the world and our place in it.

Plus, even though school buildings are shuttered, that doesn’t mean learning has stopped. Writing can help us reflect on what’s happening in our lives and form new ideas.

We want to help inspire your writing about the coronavirus while you learn from home. Below, we offer 12 projects for students, all based on pieces from The New York Times, including personal narrative essays, editorials, comic strips and podcasts. Each project features a Times text and prompts to inspire your writing, as well as related resources from The Learning Network to help you develop your craft. Some also offer opportunities to get your work published in The Times, on The Learning Network or elsewhere.

We know this list isn’t nearly complete. If you have ideas for other pandemic-related writing projects, please suggest them in the comments.

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Essay On Covid-19: 100, 200 and 300 Words

• Updated on  
• Apr 30, 2024

COVID-19, also known as the Coronavirus, is a global pandemic that has affected people all around the world. It first emerged in a lab in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and quickly spread to countries around the world. This virus was reportedly caused by SARS-CoV-2. Since then, it has spread rapidly to many countries, causing widespread illness and impacting our lives in numerous ways. This blog talks about the details of this virus and also drafts an essay on COVID-19 in 100, 200 and 300 words for students and professionals. 

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay On COVID-19 in English 100 Words
• 2 Essay On COVID-19 in 200 Words
• 3 Essay On COVID-19 in 300 Words
• 4 Short Essay on Covid-19

Essay On COVID-19 in English 100 Words

COVID-19, also known as the coronavirus, is a global pandemic. It started in late 2019 and has affected people all around the world. The virus spreads very quickly through someone’s sneeze and respiratory issues.

COVID-19 has had a significant impact on our lives, with lockdowns, travel restrictions, and changes in daily routines. To prevent the spread of COVID-19, we should wear masks, practice social distancing, and wash our hands frequently. 

People should follow social distancing and other safety guidelines and also learn the tricks to be safe stay healthy and work the whole challenging time. 

Also Read: National Safe Motherhood Day 2023

Essay On COVID-19 in 200 Words

COVID-19 also known as coronavirus, became a global health crisis in early 2020 and impacted mankind around the world. This virus is said to have originated in Wuhan, China in late 2019. It belongs to the coronavirus family and causes flu-like symptoms. It impacted the healthcare systems, economies and the daily lives of people all over the world. 

The most crucial aspect of COVID-19 is its highly spreadable nature. It is a communicable disease that spreads through various means such as coughs from infected persons, sneezes and communication. Due to its easy transmission leading to its outbreaks, there were many measures taken by the government from all over the world such as Lockdowns, Social Distancing, and wearing masks. 

There are many changes throughout the economic systems, and also in daily routines. Other measures such as schools opting for Online schooling, Remote work options available and restrictions on travel throughout the country and internationally. Subsequently, to cure and top its outbreak, the government started its vaccine campaigns, and other preventive measures. 

In conclusion, COVID-19 tested the patience and resilience of the mankind. This pandemic has taught people the importance of patience, effort and humbleness. 

Also Read : Essay on My Best Friend

Essay On COVID-19 in 300 Words

COVID-19, also known as the coronavirus, is a serious and contagious disease that has affected people worldwide. It was first discovered in late 2019 in Cina and then got spread in the whole world. It had a major impact on people’s life, their school, work and daily lives. 

COVID-19 is primarily transmitted from person to person through respiratory droplets produced and through sneezes, and coughs of an infected person. It can spread to thousands of people because of its highly contagious nature. To cure the widespread of this virus, there are thousands of steps taken by the people and the government. 

Wearing masks is one of the essential precautions to prevent the virus from spreading. Social distancing is another vital practice, which involves maintaining a safe distance from others to minimize close contact.

Very frequent handwashing is also very important to stop the spread of this virus. Proper hand hygiene can help remove any potential virus particles from our hands, reducing the risk of infection. 

In conclusion, the Coronavirus has changed people’s perspective on living. It has also changed people’s way of interacting and how to live. To deal with this virus, it is very important to follow the important guidelines such as masks, social distancing and techniques to wash your hands. Getting vaccinated is also very important to go back to normal life and cure this virus completely.

Also Read: Essay on Abortion in English in 650 Words

Short Essay on Covid-19

Please find below a sample of a short essay on Covid-19 for school students:

Also Read: Essay on Women’s Day in 200 and 500 words

to write an essay on COVID-19, understand your word limit and make sure to cover all the stages and symptoms of this disease. You need to highlight all the challenges and impacts of COVID-19. Do not forget to conclude your essay with positive precautionary measures.

Writing an essay on COVID-19 in 200 words requires you to cover all the challenges, impacts and precautions of this disease. You don’t need to describe all of these factors in brief, but make sure to add as many options as your word limit allows.

The full form for COVID-19 is Corona Virus Disease of 2019.

Related Reads

Hence, we hope that this blog has assisted you in comprehending with an essay on COVID-19. For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu.

Simran Popli

An avid writer and a creative person. With an experience of 1.5 years content writing, Simran has worked with different areas. From medical to working in a marketing agency with different clients to Ed-tech company, the journey has been diverse. Creative, vivacious and patient are the words that describe her personality.

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Impact of COVID-19 on people's livelihoods, their health and our food systems

Joint statement by ilo, fao, ifad and who.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic loss of human life worldwide and presents an unprecedented challenge to public health, food systems and the world of work. The economic and social disruption caused by the pandemic is devastating: tens of millions of people are at risk of falling into extreme poverty, while the number of undernourished people, currently estimated at nearly 690 million, could increase by up to 132 million by the end of the year.

Millions of enterprises face an existential threat. Nearly half of the world’s 3.3 billion global workforce are at risk of losing their livelihoods. Informal economy workers are particularly vulnerable because the majority lack social protection and access to quality health care and have lost access to productive assets. Without the means to earn an income during lockdowns, many are unable to feed themselves and their families. For most, no income means no food, or, at best, less food and less nutritious food. 

The pandemic has been affecting the entire food system and has laid bare its fragility. Border closures, trade restrictions and confinement measures have been preventing farmers from accessing markets, including for buying inputs and selling their produce, and agricultural workers from harvesting crops, thus disrupting domestic and international food supply chains and reducing access to healthy, safe and diverse diets. The pandemic has decimated jobs and placed millions of livelihoods at risk. As breadwinners lose jobs, fall ill and die, the food security and nutrition of millions of women and men are under threat, with those in low-income countries, particularly the most marginalized populations, which include small-scale farmers and indigenous peoples, being hardest hit.

Millions of agricultural workers – waged and self-employed – while feeding the world, regularly face high levels of working poverty, malnutrition and poor health, and suffer from a lack of safety and labour protection as well as other types of abuse. With low and irregular incomes and a lack of social support, many of them are spurred to continue working, often in unsafe conditions, thus exposing themselves and their families to additional risks. Further, when experiencing income losses, they may resort to negative coping strategies, such as distress sale of assets, predatory loans or child labour. Migrant agricultural workers are particularly vulnerable, because they face risks in their transport, working and living conditions and struggle to access support measures put in place by governments. Guaranteeing the safety and health of all agri-food workers – from primary producers to those involved in food processing, transport and retail, including street food vendors – as well as better incomes and protection, will be critical to saving lives and protecting public health, people’s livelihoods and food security.

In the COVID-19 crisis food security, public health, and employment and labour issues, in particular workers’ health and safety, converge. Adhering to workplace safety and health practices and ensuring access to decent work and the protection of labour rights in all industries will be crucial in addressing the human dimension of the crisis. Immediate and purposeful action to save lives and livelihoods should include extending social protection towards universal health coverage and income support for those most affected. These include workers in the informal economy and in poorly protected and low-paid jobs, including youth, older workers, and migrants. Particular attention must be paid to the situation of women, who are over-represented in low-paid jobs and care roles. Different forms of support are key, including cash transfers, child allowances and healthy school meals, shelter and food relief initiatives, support for employment retention and recovery, and financial relief for businesses, including micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. In designing and implementing such measures it is essential that governments work closely with employers and workers.

Countries dealing with existing humanitarian crises or emergencies are particularly exposed to the effects of COVID-19. Responding swiftly to the pandemic, while ensuring that humanitarian and recovery assistance reaches those most in need, is critical.

Now is the time for global solidarity and support, especially with the most vulnerable in our societies, particularly in the emerging and developing world. Only together can we overcome the intertwined health and social and economic impacts of the pandemic and prevent its escalation into a protracted humanitarian and food security catastrophe, with the potential loss of already achieved development gains.

We must recognize this opportunity to build back better, as noted in the Policy Brief issued by the United Nations Secretary-General. We are committed to pooling our expertise and experience to support countries in their crisis response measures and efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. We need to develop long-term sustainable strategies to address the challenges facing the health and agri-food sectors. Priority should be given to addressing underlying food security and malnutrition challenges, tackling rural poverty, in particular through more and better jobs in the rural economy, extending social protection to all, facilitating safe migration pathways and promoting the formalization of the informal economy.

We must rethink the future of our environment and tackle climate change and environmental degradation with ambition and urgency. Only then can we protect the health, livelihoods, food security and nutrition of all people, and ensure that our ‘new normal’ is a better one.

Media Contacts

Kimberly Chriscaden

Communications Officer World Health Organization

Nutrition and Food Safety (NFS) and COVID-19