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From the emergence of the COVID pandemic in early 2020 through the delayed staging of the Tokyo Olympic games in summer 2021, A Games Changer takes the reader behind the scenes to explore the myriad challenges the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Japanese officials faced during the months of uncertainty leading up not only to the postponement of the Games but also to their delayed.

Drawing on a thorough review of contemporary newspaper and magazine coverage as well as personal interviews with current and former IOC officials, Stephen R. Wenn and Robert K. Barney examine Japan’s rising excitement in 2019 as preparations for the Games accelerated; whispers of a mysterious disease spreading first in China, then worldwide; organizers’ initial resolve to press forward with the Games; the tumultuous discussions that ultimately resulted in the joint March 2020 decision by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and IOC President Thomas Bach to postpone the Games; and the numerous negotiations with venues, media, and sponsors required to extend contracts and protect all parties’ health. Wenn and Barney reveal how human relationships—among planners, politicians, competitors, and vaccine researchers—were vital to presenting an Olympics where, in July and August 2021, world records were set, deferred dreams were achieved, and fears of a superspreader event went unrealized.

While tracing the struggles of multiple athletes who had to pause their Olympic hopes and training as COVID-19 closed the world, Wenn and Barney focus on the journey of Canadian decathlete Damian Warner and his coach, Gar Leyshon. Denied his usual training venues, he prepared for the rescheduled Games with ingenuity, determination, and adaptability, reflective of the resilience demonstrated by Tokyo’s Olympians around the globe. The authors’ close account of Warner’s two days in Tokyo recaptures the excitement and drama of sport that home viewers sorely needed amid pandemic lockdowns and incalculable personal loss.

The pandemic presented religion as a paradox: faith is often crucial for helping people weather life’s troubles and make difficult decisions, but how can religion continue to deliver these benefits and provide societal structure without social contact?  The topical volume, An Epidemic among My People explains how the COVID-19 pandemic stress tested American religious communities and created a new politics of religion centered on public health.

The editors and contributorsconsider how the virus and government policy affected religion in America. Chapters examine the link between the prosperity gospel and conspiracy theories, the increased purchase of firearms by evangelicals, the politics of challenging public health orders as religious freedom claims, and the reactions of Christian nationalists, racial groups, and female clergy to the pandemic (and pandemic politics). As sharp lines were drawn between people and their governments during this uncertain time, An Epidemic among My People provides a comprehensive portrait of religion in American public life.  

COVID-19 is the most significant global crisis of any of our lifetimes. The numbers have been stupefying, whether of infection and mortality, the scale of public health measures, or the economic consequences of shutdown. Coronavirus Politics identifies key threads in the global comparative discussion that continue to shed light on COVID-19 and shape debates about what it means for scholarship in health and comparative politics. Editors Scott L. Greer, Elizabeth J. King, Elize Massard da Fonseca, and André Peralta-Santos bring together over 30 authors versed in politics and the health issues in order to understand the health policy decisions, the public health interventions, the social policy decisions, their interactions, and the reasons. The book’s coverage is global, with a wide range of key and exemplary countries, and contains a mixture of comparative, thematic, and templated country studies. All go beyond reporting and monitoring to develop explanations that draw on the authors' expertise while engaging in structured conversations across the book.

A forceful critique of how and why states failed to protect marginalized communities in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the implications of ignoring the existing emergencies that exacerbated the pandemic’s devastating effects.
 

The COVID-19 pandemic inaugurated a state of emergency unprecedented for most Americans. Some could observe this emergency from the relative safety of their homes, but those in marginalized communities, without access to the same privileges, were forced to risk their health and well-being. 
 
In Emergency, sociologist Claire Laurier Decoteau documents and theorizes the emergencies of COVID-19 by looking at the experiences of Chicagoans and the policies that shaped their lives. She describes the uneven racial impact of COVID-19 on Black and Latinx Chicagoans as a crisis within a crisis, caused by a convergence of emergencies: a state of emergency that protected white supremacy and wealth, the slow emergencies racially marginalized populations have faced for decades due to the long-term gutting of care infrastructure and deindustrialization, and the sacrifice “essential workers” were asked to make to protect the United States economy. As Decoteau shows, the city’s “racial equity” project used data to determine which communities would be given scarce resources, but once positivity or death rates declined, resources were retracted and redistributed elsewhere. City officials thus attempted to manage these converging emergencies by manipulating epidemiological data and orchestrating systems for interpreting that data. Decoteau makes clear that the emergencies precipitated by COVID-19 long predated the pandemic, and that we will continue to live with their compounding crises if we do not tackle their structural underpinnings.

Lavender Fields uses autoethnography to explore how Black girls and women are living with and through COVID-19. It centers their pain, joys, and imaginations for a more just future as we confront all the inequalities that COVID-19 exposes.

Black women and girls in the United States are among the hardest hit by the pandemic in terms of illnesses, deaths, evictions, and increasing economic inequality. Riffing off Alice Walker’s telling of her search for Zora Neal Hurston, the authors of these essays and reflections offer raw tellings of Black girls’ and women’s experiences written in real time, as some of the contributors battled COVID-19 themselves.

The essays center Black girls and women and their testimonies in hopes of moving them from the margin to the center. With a diversity of voices and ages, this volume taps into the Black feminine interior, that place where Audre Lorde tells us that feelings lie, to access knowledge—generational, past, and contemporary—to explore how Black women navigate COVID-19. Using womanism and spirituality, among other modalities, the authors explore deep feelings, advancing Black feminist theorizing on Black feminist praxis and methodology.

In centering the stories of Black girls and women’s experiences with COVID-19, this work brings much-needed justice and equity to conversations about the pandemic. Just as Walker worked diligently to find Hurston, Lavender Fields attempts to “find” Black women amid all we are experiencing, ensuring visibility and attention.

Contributors
Tamaya Bailey
reelaviolette botts-ward
Kyrah K. Brown
Brianna Y. Clark
Kenyatta Dawson
LeConté J. Dill
Maryam O. Funmilayo
Brandie Green
Courtney Jackson
Sara Jean-Francois
Julia S. Jordan-Zachery
Angela K. Lewis-Maddox
Annet Matebwe
Mbali Mazibuko
Radscheda Nobles
Nimot Ogunfemi
J. Mercy Okaalet
Chizoba Uzoamaka Okoroma
Peace Ossom-Williamson
Elizabeth Peart

Uses stories of life under Hong Kong’s strict pandemic restrictions to inspire mental health awareness.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a global crisis that affected millions of lives and brought mental health challenges to the forefront. In Hong Kong, the situation was worsened by uniquely strict COVID-19 regulations, quarantine measures, and travel restrictions. The mental health issues associated with the pandemic did not end with the lifting of the mask mandate. On the contrary, the repercussions are only just beginning to surface and their impact will be felt for years to come.

This eye-opening book shares the stories of ordinary Hongkongers who faced extraordinary challenges during the pandemic. Through a blend of first-person accounts, psychological insights, and hard data, it offers a compelling and accessible exploration of the toll that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken on mental health in Hong Kong.

However, Pandemic Minds is not only a chronicle of suffering—it is also a guide to healing and hope. It offers practical advice on how to overcome the mental health issues caused by the pandemic, and how to build resilience and well-being. It reveals the lessons that can be learned from Hong Kong’s experience, and how they can help individuals and policymakers around the world.
 

At the close of 2019, the United States saw a record-low poverty rate. At the start of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to upend that trend and plunge millions of Americans into poverty. However, despite the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, the poverty rate declined to the lowest in modern U.S. history. In Poverty in the Pandemic social policy scholar Zachary Parolin provides a data-driven account of how poverty influenced the economic, social, and health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., as well as how the country’s policy response led to historically low poverty rates.
 
Drawing on dozens of data sources ranging from debit and credit card spending, the first national databases of school and childcare center closures in the U.S., and bi-weekly Census-run surveys on well-being, Parolin finds that entering the pandemic in poverty substantially increased a person’s likelihood of experiencing negative health outcomes due to the pandemic, such as contracting and dying from COVID, as well as losing their job. Additionally, he found that students from poor families suffered the greatest learning losses as a result of school closures and the shift to distance learning during the pandemic. 
 
However, unprecedented legislative action by the U.S. government, including the passage of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, and the American Rescue Plan (ARP) helped mitigate the economic consequences of the pandemic and lifted around 18 million Americans out of poverty. Based on the success of these policies, Parolin concludes with policy suggestions that the U.S. can implement in more ‘normal’ times to improve the living conditions of low-income households after the pandemic subsides, including expanding access to Unemployment Insurance, permanently expanding the Child Tax Credit, promoting greater access to affordable, high-quality healthcare coverage, and investing more resources into the Census Bureau’s data-collection capabilities. He also details a method of producing a monthly measurement of poverty, to be used in conjunction with the traditional annual measurement, in order to better understand the intra-year volatility of poverty that many Americans experience.
 
Poverty in the Pandemic provides the most complete account to date of the unique challenges that low-income households in the U.S. faced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
 

COVID-19 vaccines were a historic triumph, with less than a year between the initial identification of the microbe and effective vaccines being administered. They were also a public administration challenge, demanding that governments of the world procure and administer billions of doses in widely different contexts. In many countries they were intensely polarizing, catalyzing a rise in anti-vaccination politics.

Vaccination Politics brings together public health and political science expertise for a global, systematic comparison of vaccination politics. The authors look at 32 countries’ experiences—from Austria to Malawi and the United States to Hong Kong—to understand how trust, wealth, pharmaceutical industries, regulators, international organizations, and health systems succeeded or failed at acquiring vaccines and vaccinating citizens. It shows how different governments and populations navigated challenges. Global inequality, political trust, contestation over health system priorities, and opportunistic politicians all played roles in shaping the subsequent politics of health and vaccination around the world. A conclusion brings together lessons for policy and key issues for further research. While the next pandemic is unknown to us today, the response to it will be shaped by the positive and negative legacies of COVID-19 vaccination politics.