Guest Editor's Introduction

the sars-cov-2 pandemic upended most aspects of human existence, disrupting national and global economies, requiring severe lockdowns and the shutting of schools and universities, and severely impacting human health. While official figures indicate that more than 6 million human beings lost their lives to the pandemic, as further national analyses of excess deaths are made, this is almost certainly an undercount. In South Africa, for instance, it is estimated that the mortality figures are underestimated by a factor of 3. This represents deep human suffering with continuing, severe long-term effects. Science was drawn into the fray to answer the urgency for solutions to address the pandemic, a call for “speeded-up” science. Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, said in an interview with Ian Sample of the Guardian, “It has been utterly exhausting at times. I’ve been involved in plenty of intense scientific competitions but this is different. You have this sense that every day counts, that what you are working on may save some lives and that you cannot make mistakes, you cannot afford to give anything less than 100%” (Sample 2020). The pandemic also drove the “industrial” use of new technologies, some of which were previously restricted to research laboratories. Though slow at first, the social sciences were mobilized in many parts of the world to address the behavioral aspects of the response to the pandemic, the socioeconomic implications of the policy options adopted by governments, and the long-term psychosocial effects of infection. The individual and social costs of the pandemic’s devastating impact on schools have yet to be understood.