The dread (and/or denial) of death

The term ‘crisis’ has a consistently negative connotation in everyday life. Crises – often exaggerated by the media and politics – cause fear, panic, insecurity and powerlessness. Dealing with great uncertainty therefore challenges all those involved during a crisis; everyone expects instructions for action, planning, explanations and ultimately security. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman emphasises all these factors of insecurity in his description of crises. Uncertainty primarily promotes the emergence of fear, he claims: ‘ “Fear” is the name that we give to our uncertainty: to our ignorance of the threat and what is to be done – what can and what can't be – to stop it in its tracks – or to fight it back if stopping it is beyond our power’ (Bauman, 2006: 2).

In the case of the COVID-19 crisis, uncertainty continues to play a salient role. The illness caused by the COVID-19 SARS virus was hitherto unknown. Successful treatments did not exist at first; therefore, medical treatment was based on trial and error. Scientists across the globe started investigating the origin, composition, spread and ever new mutations of the virus (see Gallagher, 2020). They collaborated in numerous attempts to develop a new vaccine and to find adequate medication; this finally succeeded in the northern hemisphere autumn and winter of 2020 and, in December 2020, the first elderly patients in the UK were vaccinated (Diaz, 2020).

In the spring of 2020, during the so- called first wave of the pandemic, however, the images repeatedly disseminated across the media of ill and dying patients in intensive care wards, specifically in Bergamo and other northern Italian cities, as well as the reported fact that there was no space left in some Italian, American and Spanish cemeteries for the huge influx of coffins, necessarily triggered an unprecedented ‘dread of death’ (Bauman, 2006: 22–4). In summer 2020, the numbers of positive cases and deaths dropped and the severe restrictions were relaxed; many people assumed that the pandemic was almost over.