ABSTRACT
Allegedly for the health of their people, governments across the globe have responded to the SARS-CoV-2 virus by imposing restrictions on social, cultural, personal, and political life the like of which have never been tried before. The aim, as the UK government’s sound bite goes: to stop the spread of a virus that has been implicitly, and often explicitly, presented as more lethal than any of the last century. Whether governments’ measures stopped the spread of the virus is contested; what is not in doubt is that they stopped the spread of health. This chapter begins from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s claim that health is essentially “enigmatic” and therefore anathema to the metrics and policies that claim to promote health at the level of populations in order to argue that health is an achievement that is nurtured constantly and mostly tacitly within and between beings. Insofar as the fear incited by governments’ relentless promotion of the threat posed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus has dismantled individuals’ confidence in interpreting and negotiating their personal embodiment, and to the extent that governments’ imposition of masking, distancing, and quarantine has pulled people apart from one another, governments’ response to the “Covid crisis” has removed the conditions necessary for their people to be healthy.
