Health geography in the time of Covid-19: Selected papers from the 19th International Medical Geography Symposium, Edinburgh, UK, July 2022

Abstract

The global impact of the Covid-19 pandemic – first recorded in the Wuhan province in China in December 2019 – has been immense with (at the time of writing: March 2024) around seven million deaths across the world. Yet the wider societal impacts of the disease, including those relating to strategies to delay and reduce its peak prevalence, are only starting to be understood. Notably, key academic and policy perspectives on Covid-19, particularly the wider impacts of the pandemic on everyday life, and by extension population health and wellbeing, have emerged from research in the social sciences, including health geography. The Covid-19 pandemic has emphasised the importance of insights from health geography amongst research, policy and public audiences with multilevel spatial perspectives providing key insights into the transmission, direct impacts and wider significance of the pandemic. Important insights from health geography relate to issues including: the spread of the disease; spatial risk factors and resilience; dimensions of inequalities on transmission and prevalence; the lasting impacts of ‘stay-at-home’ orders and the reshaping of daily mobility; the emergence of ‘essential workers’ with implications for exploitation, exposure and risk; changes to working practices and job security; changes in access to, and availability of, primary and secondary health services, amongst many other concerns (Andrews et al., 2022). Many of these are well-established concerns amongst health geographers who have long-recognised the vital interconnections between the changing spaces we inhabit in our daily lives and a multitude of health and wellbeing concerns.

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.116811

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https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/07403ca4-c345-4bf6-ab2e-c70341109c6e