A post by Jennifer Fraser

It’s been just over a year since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, and I don’t think I’ve ever done more imagining. I’ve imagined what it would be like to hug my parents, to go out for dinner, or have coffee with a friend. In fact, as I sit at my messy dining room table, frantically trying to finish this piece, I’m imagining what it would be like to work in an office—or indeed, anywhere—that is not surrounded by a vacuuming husband, a crying toddler, or a barking dog.

It turns out that I’m not the only one that has been using my imagination. Whether it be by planning a future event, fanaticizing about a post-COVID-19 world, building a hug-tunnel, or playing Animal Crossing, many of us have used our imaginations to help quell our pandemic-related anxieties, cope with periods of prolonged social isolation, and help ease the tedium that is life under lockdown. The imagination has also played into how we’ve responded to the novel coronavirus on a systems-level.

For instance, imagined scenarios are often invoked to maintain public compliance with a set of increasingly stringent health guidelines (ex. how would you feel if you were from a high-risk group? Or, what will happen if our hospital system gets overburdened?) (Vincent & Slutsky, 2020). They also underlie disease modelling, as projections of infection numbers, vaccine rollout, or ICU-bed availability are, ultimately, reflections of an imagined future (Toon, 2016).” Imagination also features prominently in epidemiological discourse. In May of 2020, ex-director of the CDC’s Office of Public Health Preparedness Ali S. Khan stated that imagination was a crucial aspect of strategic decision-making (Quammen, 2020). In October, Harvard professor Bill Hanage critiqued the lack of creative-thinking in the UK government’s lockdown-focused pandemic response plan, lamenting: “Where is the imagination?” (Oluwole, 2020).