COVID-19

'This impressive book analyses the medical and social impacts of the Covid-19 virus pandemic. The medical impact has been extensive from trying to understand this new virus, create a new vaccine, and shift medical resources in the face of large infection and death rates. This ambitious book covers all of these topics under the equally important idea that Covid-19 is not simply a medical disease, but also a social one. This is the real strength of Peter Murphy’s book. He analyses the extensive social impacts from public and economic policy including lockdowns and wage subsidies, to social ones including changes to our habits that are now known as ‘social distancing’ – proximity, touch, hygiene. He argues that there were more than proportional measures on some policies and less than proportional ones on others.'

Professor John Rundell, Editor-in-Chief of Critical Horizons and the Social and Critical Theory book series

COVID-19: Proportionality, Public Policy and Social Distance explores the social and political response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It details the sociological aspects of the spread of the virus, the role played by social distancing in virus mitigation, and the comparative effect of social proximity and distance on national anti-viral behavior. Peter Murphy discusses various public policy approaches to the pandemic and their successes and failures. In this engaging analysis, he investigates the way that contemporary societies think about risk, threat and harm, and how social mood affected the response to COVID-19.

Peter Murphy is the author of The Political Economy of Prosperity (2020), Limited Government (2018) Auto-Industrialism (2017), Universities and Innovation Economies (2015) and The Collective Imagination (2012), among other books. He is Adjunct Professor of Social Sciences at La Trobe University and in The Cairns Institute at James Cook University, Australia.