ABSTRACT
This analysis aims to demonstrate the considerable analytical power of social death theory to justify the inclusion of social causes of death into official measures of mortality. The UK’s governmental and social policy in/actions during the Covid-19 pandemic are imposing social death on the most vulnerable. People are dying because of social causes of death, that is social death. This may, or may not, be accompanied by the Covid-19. The extensive analytical capability of social death theory is evidenced in three major schools of thought: slavery, death studies and genocide. Together with their exceptions, they move beyond established sociological categories to challenge the conceptual robustness of the OECD’s ‘preventable mortality’, which can be avoided through public health prevention. Furthermore, the use of the International Classification of Disease (ICD) for classifying causes of death is called into question due to its lack of capacity to encompass social realities of death and dying. This raises the broader question of how mortality is measured. Analysis of social death imposed on Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) people and care home residents during the Covid-19 pandemic reveals social causes of death. Consequently, urgent governmental action is required to prevent social causes of death along with inclusion of social death into measures of mortality.
