For all the real-world tragedy, COVID-19 will long be prized by social scientists as a “natural experiment.” Arriving as an unanticipated exogenous shock, it has offered a unique opportunity to see how components of the social system—public health, politics, and economics most obviously—might best respond. From the perspective of cultural sociology, the pivotal opportunity for investigation is one of meaning. The emerging COVID-19 outbreak presented a novelty that was strange, disruptive, and dangerous. Could society make sense of something entirely unknown, except to the handful of super-centenarians who had witnessed the influenza epidemic in 1918? It turns out the cultural system was up to the cognitive task. [Read more here.]

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