Negotiating risks and responsibilities during lockdown: ethical reasoning and affective experience in Aotearoa New Zealand

Who We Test For: Aligning Relational and Public Health Responsibilities in COVID-19 Testing in Scotland

COVID-19 testing programs in the UK often called on people to test to "protect others." In this article we explore motivations to test and the relationships to "others" involved in an asymptomatic testing program at a Scottish university. We show that participants engaged with testing as a relational technology, through which they navigated multiple overlapping responsibilities to kin, colleagues, flatmates, strangers, and to more diffuse publics. We argue that the success of testing as a technique of governance depends not only on the production of disciplined selves, but also on the program's capacity to align interpersonal and public scales of responsibility.

Citizenship in times of crisis: biosocial state-citizen relations during COVID-19 in Austria

Drawing upon 152 in-depth qualitative interviews with residents in Austria carried out in the first year of the pandemic, this article discusses how people's experiences with COVID-19 policies reflect and reshape state-citizen relations. Coinciding with a significant government crisis, the first year of COVID-19 in Austria saw pandemic measures justified with reference to a biological, often medical understanding of health that framed disease prevention in terms of transmission reduction, often with reference to metrics such as hospitalisation rates, etc. Instead of using this biomedical frame, our interviewees, however, drew attention to biopsychosocial dimensions of the crisis and problematised the entanglements between economy and health. We call this the emergence of a biosocial notion of citizenship that is attentive to psychological, social and economic dimensions of health. Insights into the biosocial nature of pandemic citizenship open a window of opportunity for addressing long-standing social injustices.

Community healthcare workers' experiences during and after COVID-19 lockdown: A qualitative study from Aotearoa New Zealand

Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic reached Aotearoa New Zealand, stringent lockdown measures lasting 7 weeks were introduced to manage community spread of the virus. This paper reports the findings of a qualitative study examining how lockdown measures impacted upon the lives of nurses, midwives and personal care assistants caring for community-based patients during this time. The study involved nationwide surveys and in-depth interviews with 15 registered nurses employed in community settings, two community midwives and five personal care assistants. During the lockdown, nurses, midwives and personal care assistants working in the community showed considerable courage in answering their 'call to duty' by taking on heightened care responsibilities and going 'the extra mile' to help others. They faced significant risks to personal and professional relationships when they were required to take on additional and complex responsibilities for community-based patients. Despite the hypervigilant monitoring of their personal protective equipment (PPE), the need to safeguard family and community members generated considerable stress and anxiety. Many also faced personal isolation and loneliness as a result of lockdown restrictions. Moreover, the negative impacts of experiences during lockdown often continued to be felt once restrictions had been lifted, inflecting life during periods in which community transmission of COVID-19 was not occurring. This article makes five core service delivery and policy recommendations for supporting community-based nurses, midwives and personal care assistants in respiratory disease pandemics: acknowledging the crucial role played by community-based carers and the associated stress and anxiety they endured by championing respect and compassion; demystifying the 'heroism' or 'self-sacrifice' projected onto care workers; the timely provision of adequate protective equipment; improving remuneration, with adequate provision for time off; and regular counselling, peer support groups and education on work-life balance delivered by support workers in recognition of stressors arising from these complex and isolated working conditions.

Longitudinal Cohort Study of Depression and Anxiety Among Older Informal Caregivers Following the Initial COVID-19 Pandemic Response in Aotearoa New Zealand

Objectives

To assess the impact of providing care and conditions of care on psychological wellbeing among older informal caregivers following the initial period of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Methods

Data were from population-based cohorts of older adults participating in the 2020 Health, Work and Retirement longitudinal survey (n = 3839, 17.4% informal caregivers). Changes in symptoms of depression and anxiety over 2018–2020 surveys associated with sociodemographic factors, caregiving, cohabitation with the care recipient, assistance provided with activities of daily living, support in providing care, and opportunity cost of care were assessed.

Results

Increased depression, but not anxiety, was associated with providing informal care. Among caregivers, lower living standards and cohabitation were associated with increased depression. Lower living standards, unemployment, and lower help from friend/family networks were associated with increased anxiety.

Discussion

Economic hardship and social capital provide targets for supporting psychological wellbeing of older caregivers during periods of pandemic restrictions.

To wish you well: the biopolitical subjectivities of medical crowdfunders during and after Aotearoa New Zealand's COVID-19 lockdown

Crowdfunding platforms apply a marketized, competitive logic to healthcare, increasingly functioning as generative spaces in which worthy citizens and biopolitical subjects are produced. Using a lens of biopower, this article considers what sort of biopolitical subjectivities were produced in and through New Zealand crowdfunding campaigns during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. It focuses on a discursive and dialogical analysis of 59 online medical crowdfunding campaigns that were active during lockdown and chose to mention the pandemic. These pages pointed to interrelated biological, social and economic precarities, speaking to questions about how citizens navigate uneven needs during uncertain times. Findings showed that crowdfunders referred to the pandemic in order to narrate their own situation in culturally coherent ways and to establish context-specific relations of care. This included contextualising their needs through establishing shared crisis narratives that also made the infrastructural contexts of healthcare visible and performing relational labour in ways that aligned with nationally specific affective regimes. By highlighting their own vulnerability, crowdfunders strategically mobilised broader lockdown discourses of self-sacrifice on behalf of vulnerable people. In this way, New Zealand's lockdown produced subjectivities both drawing on wider neoliberal moral regimes and specific to the nuanced and emergent moral systems of pandemic citizenship.

Ways of Being Together During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Support Bubbles and the Legal Construction of Relationships

This article focuses on the concept of the support bubble. The concept was introduced in New Zealand in March 2020 in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic to denote a network of people with whom a person could have physical contact, and was later taken up in various forms elsewhere, particularly in the UK. The article focuses on the meaning that was attached to the concept and to the ways of being together that it encapsulated and stipulated. Where support bubbles were formalised as a matter of law, as in New Zealand and the UK, a particular form of relating was legally constructed and real relationships were affected through law. The article addresses the meaning and implications of the concept of the support bubble in this light. First, it considers the concept of the support bubble as a new legal form, which drew in, and built on, a range of relationships and then recast them in terms of a new legal form. Second, it analyses the central question posed by the concept as one of the meaning of being together in a support bubble, not only for those navigating and living with the concept in practice, but also as mediated in and through law. Third, it outlines how the concept of the support bubble represented a distinct legal development. It enabled those who were eligible to define for themselves, albeit within a specified framework, the meaning and nature of a relationship of support of this kind. It also supplied a space in which some kinds of relationships that had not necessarily attracted much previous legal attention-like friendships and dating relationships-came to find a degree of legal reflection and recognition.