Introduction
Since its early debut in Wuhan, China, during winter 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated human communities all over the world as a global hurricane (Horton, 2021; Lupton & Willis, 2021). Its dramatic impacts on health, on the population, on the economy and on the society as a whole have suddenly put us in touch with tragedies, as the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and the Great 1929 recession, that we were used to consider as belonging to our history only, especially in western countries (Livi-Bacci, 2017, 2021).
Unlike the aforementioned past tragedies, the COVID-19 pandemic has been the first one in mankind history under the lenses of science, being thus entirely monitored, described, and communicated daily to the population, by the tools of statistics. Since the beginning of the story, mass media—from newspapers to newscasts to the internet—have been permanently occupied by experts talking about data, graphs and tables communicating to us the daily news from the pandemic battlefield. This certainly had the merit to enable citizens and the entire public opinion to finally familiarize in their daily life with science and its tools, though it also led to somewhat undesired consequences, such as the parallel “infodemia” and related information disorder (Bursztyn et al., 2020; Cinelli et al., 2020). Overall, however, this ubiquitous presence and monitoring by science was not able to avoid that the eventual—direct and indirect—impact of the pandemic, and of its mitigation measures, was catastrophic (Horton, 2021; Lupton & Willis, 2021) and will likely last for a long time in the future.
In this nasty scenario, an indisputable merit of the continued focus of science on the pandemic lied in the endless list of scientific questions that were posed and in the resulting unprecedented mobilization of scientific interests and resources. For example, a search on PubMed repository at current date (October 18th, 2021) revealed 187,837 indexed scientific papers including the word “COVID-19” (PubMed 2021). Obviously, many of the raised questions are still un-answered but their investigation is opening formidable tasks for research in almost all scientific fields, including demography. With hindsight, most pre-COVID-19 research on topics as pandemic risk, pandemic preparedness, and especially that of societal protection from such events, was largely confined to a restricted number of specific fields mainly related to the areas of public health and medicine, and their statistical and mathematical modelling. Indeed, on a one hand, a wide and high-quality literature emerged in public-health pandemic preparedness during the fight against pre-COVID alerts such as the HIV-AIDS epidemic, the 2003 SARS outbreak due to the SARS-COV-1 virus, the avian-flu alert, the 2009 H1N1 “mild” pandemic, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) crisis, the repeated devastating large-scale Ebola epidemics in Central-Africa and the Zika alert (Cooper et al., 2006; Ferguson et al., 2005, 2006; Fraser et al., 2009; Merler et al., 2015; Riley et al., 2003; Zhang et al., 2017). This past research has put the conceptual and statistical substrate that has been used during the COVID-19 pandemic to support governmental decisions. However, on the other hand, entire disciplinary areas remained—with a few exceptions—immune to this call for research, despite the evidence that the impact of a pandemic attack would have gone largely beyond the medical and public health domains. This phenomenon is somewhat surprising if one recalls that communicable diseases still represented—long before the COVID-19 pandemic—the major component of mortality in a large part of the developing world, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa in view of the persistence of major killers such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV and other diarrheal and respiratory diseases (Bloom & Canning, 2004; Bloom et al., 2018; Murray et al., 2015). The explanation of this lack of interest by many disciplinary areas possibly lies in the western “oblivion” (Gori et al., 2020) that followed from the dramatic levels of infectious diseases control achieved by western populations along the mortality and epidemiological transitions (Livi-Bacci, 2017; Murray et al., 2015; Snowden, 2019; Solomon & Murray, 2002) as well as through the widespread prevention allowed by mass vaccination since the 1950s (e.g., van Wijhe et al. 2016), that made most traditional communicable infections extremely rare in these populations. The current pandemic has, finally, upturned this state of affairs, impressing a formidable new momentum to the investigation of communicable diseases from a broader societal standpoint.
Therefore, trusting that—thanks to widespread COVID-19 vaccination—we are getting out of the worst, it should be finally arrived the right moment for starting to appropriately answer the many un-answered questions and to—hopefully—transforming this ugly tragedy into a great lesson-to-be-learned by science and policy for the future battles on mankind.
In relation to what we stated before, as demographers, we should finally be in the position to characterise the conditions and the contexts that have contributed to favour the spread of the epidemic and the impact of its most severe consequences and, particularly, to assess the quality of the tools that have been used to evaluate the impact of the virus on mortality. This will be key to start understanding the consequences—at both the individual and the societal level—due to the pandemic and its mitigation measures.
At the time we were first writing the call for this Genus Thematic series in early Spring 2020, the COVID-19 first wave was just ongoing (and we were preconizing that it would not remain the only one). Nonetheless, some of its main features and keywords, such as complexity, multi-dimensionality of effects, and pervasiveness, were already manifest from the multiplicity of involved risks of both direct and indirect nature resulting not only from the disease per se but also, and sometimes primarily, by the enacted mitigation measures.
The above keywords (multidimensionality, complexity and pervasiveness) are well mirrored by the heterogeneity of the subjects investigated in the eight manuscripts that were eventually selected to be included in this Thematic Series. Among these, two (Soneji et al., 2021; Vanella et al., 2021) have been dealing with the chief demographic topic in relation to any pandemic crisis, namely the magnitude, timing and structure of mortality (Dowd et al., 2020; Goldstein & Lee, 2020). Three other manuscripts (Bernardi et al, 2021; Giorgi & Boertien, 2021; Makinde et al., 2021) share—though with different perspectives and methodologies—a common underlying theme, namely the conditions—at the individual and collective level—that could either favouring or limiting the spread of a deadly virus as COVID-19, as well as the impact of its direct consequences on health, from serious disease to mortality. These conditions have been identified either in the household structures and housing conditions (the contribution by Makinde et al., 2021), or in population structures (the heterogeneity in co-residence structures analysed by Giorgi & Boertien, 2021) or, finally, in the devastating role played by living in nursing homes especially during the first pandemic wave (Bernardi et al., 2021). One contribution has been more generally dealing with the conditions favouring or hindering social resilience against the multiple risk factors, both direct and indirect, emerged during the pandemic, such as the disruption of social and economic activities and relationship. These were identified in typically social structures, namely the “protection social networks” analysed by Furfaro et al. (2021). Finally, the remaining two manuscripts have investigated the impact of the first phases of the pandemic (and related control measures) on life histories, namely on the transition to adulthood (analysed by Luppi et al, 2021) and on mental and psychological health of university students (Busetta et al, 2021).
Before introducing to the articles included in this Thematic series, a preliminary remark on the pandemic chronology and the timing of this special issue might be useful. As it also happened for many other special issues on COVID-19, the present one was motivated by—and indeed its contents cover—a precise epoch of the pandemic, primarily the first wave or a part of the second one. Clearly, the history of the pandemic was so complex, with so many new events, evidences and discoveries occurred after the first wave, that many of the stories related to the early pandemic epoch might appear to many observers as belonging to a far past. For this reason, and in order to avoid that the published papers appeared excessively "time-contextualized", contributing authors were asked to upgrade their manuscripts in order to set them within the broader context of the COVID-19 pandemic so as to avoid a rapid decay of the interest for the involved topics, analyses and results.