Abstract
Disease surveillance is one of the key state- and increasingly capital-based techniques for early warning of emerging disease threats, disease containment and control. Yet this form of oversight often raises fears in terms of suspensions of social order, disqualification of ‘improper lives’ and reduced freedoms. In this essay, I briefly review some of the affordances and fears concerning surveillance before suggesting that the structural consistency of the COVID-19 pandemic demands a shift from an obsession with the surveillance of pathogens and contamination behaviours to a survey of and care for universal access to health. The hotspots of this disease are not only within animal markets, threatened wildlife corridors and international travel; they are in care homes and in the bodies of those who are structurally and racially marked by widening inequalities in health and well-being.
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Hinchliffe, S. (2021). Surveillance, Control and Containment (Biopolitics). In: Andrews, G.J., Crooks, V.A., Pearce, J.R., Messina, J.P. (eds) COVID-19 and Similar Futures. Global Perspectives on Health Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70179-6_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70179-6_22
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