Richard Scarry and COVID-19

You may know the children's books of Richard Scarry, with their detailed illustrations of the workings of Busytown, Scarry's representation of the modern world - transport systems, electricity, urban life, food production and so on.  They are totally absorbing and have given me, and my daughter, hours of pleasure.

My friend, Clark Miller, an STS scholar and a Professor at Arizona State University, has written a fascinating account of COVID-19 drawing on the work of Scarry.  They are well worth reading.  

As he writes:

"We are taught to think of coronavirus as a product of nature, its origins in our encounters with wildlife, its illness a product of the race between its ability to reproduce inside us and our immune system’s ability to vanquish it. But this biological view of COVID-19 conceals more than it reveals; it is a disciplinary blinder that renders the disease’s next moves invisible to our tools and our models. You can’t understand this pandemic until you understand Busytown and its inhabitants—those beings whose travels, interactions, ideas, and bodies (filled with zillions of novel coronavirus molecules) are shaped by the industrial systems that Scarry reveals for us and whose lives, in turn, have shaped the circumstances that gave birth to the virus, how and where it travels, and who it kills."

Start with Part 1 and I'm sure you will want to read Part 2 and Part 3 in short order.