Author Archives: Christos Lynteris

Lectures

From Mink to the Wild: COVID-19 through the Mirror of Sylvatic Plague

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Even as pandemic response is focused on understanding, controlling and preventing COVID-19 among humans, a ghost haunts epidemiological concerns about the disease: reverse-zoonotic sylvatic Covid. Or, the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to spill-back from humans to domestic or farmed animals, and from there to wild-life, where the virus can establish ineradicable disease reservoirs. This scenario is not far-fetched: the case of …

Lectures

COVID-19 Forum III – Introduction

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Thirty-eight days have passed since the publication of Somatosphere’s COVID-19 Forum II. In the course of these days the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 across the globe has risen from 1.1 to 4,3 million, with coronavirus-related deaths rising from 60,000 to 294,997. While some countries, like Italy and Germany, have started relaxing their lockdowns, epidemic control measures in …

Lectures

COVID-19 Forum II: Introduction

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Since the first installation of Somatosphere’s COVID-19 Forum was published on March 6, the cases of confirmed COVID-19 have risen more than ten times, from 100,000 to over 1.1 million, with coronavirus-related deaths rising from 3,400 to over 60,000. With daily new infections in China dropping to near zero, Italy, Spain and the USA have emerged as the largest hot-spots …

Lectures

COVID-19 Forum: Introduction

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Since its emergence in December 2019, COVID-19 has led to a global pandemic, in everything but name. To date, over 100,000 people have been infected across the globe, with the vast majority of burden of the infection and of the 3,400 deaths so far being borne by China, where the disease originally emerged. There the epidemic has led to the …

Books

Andrew Lakoff’s Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency

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Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency

Andrew Lakoff

University of California Press, 2017. 240 pages.

 

Let us be frank: it is hard to think preparedness in the medical humanities without thinking of Andrew Lakoff. Over the ten years since the publication of his first piece on the subject (2007), Lakoff has developed, expanded and refined the critical …

Features

Untimely Ends and the Pandemic Imaginary

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It was one of those typical late spring afternoons in Beijing, when the desert sand blowing from the North begins to give way to an electric atmosphere more pregnant with thunder than rain. Seated on a covered leather-armchair, I tried to concentrate my attention away from the rasp of the polyethene sheet under me and repeat the question: So what …