The politics of staying behind the frontline of coronavirus

Abstract

Intended as a contribution to the Waiting in Pandemic Times project Collection in response to COVID-19, this short paper views the coronavirus crisis in terms of its unpredictable effects on the interior life of the National Health Service (NHS) workforce. Based in part on ethnographic observations from the ‘frontline’ of the NHS during the hours that immediately followed a first suspected case of coronavirus at a general practice in London, it charts the collision of the ensuing crisis with working definitions of the nature of time in its relation to care. It considers what it might mean for healthcare practitioners at this particular moment in the NHS’s history to be living through an experience of ‘the ordinary’ breaking down. The paper also follows hints of new temporal modes of care appearing during this same period when one kind of crisis in the NHS has been put on hold, and another (the crisis of coronavirus) is just getting underway.