Abstract
The most recent pandemic, characterized as SARS-CoV-2, is part of a known lineage of viral pathogens that can trigger severe respiratory infections. Despite the importance of advancing biomedical knowledge as a way to guarantee treatment and effectiveness in the supposed eradication of the disease, it is no less urgent to reflect on the social circumstances that shape this new epidemiological situation. This essay analyzes how the representations of contagion and death imbricated in the health-disease dyad, as traditional phenomena, took on moral propositions, particularly between the months of January and March 2020, when the definitions of outbreak, epidemic and pandemic became inextricably mixed. In that context, and from the creation of a type of health apparatus animated by imperatives related to the deadliest form of the disease, Covid-19 gained materiality. Constituted at the confluence of ethnic-racializing conceptions, this apparatus formed the first visual and linguistic images of the disease. Finally, this article examines that the work of reception, appointment and framing of Covid-19 depended on visibility regimes conditioned by traditional processes, related to the materialization and animation of the virus as a threat not only epidemiological and social, but political and moral.
Keywords:
Sociology of science; Covid-19; Coronavirus; Biopolitics; Health; Education.
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