You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
On January 17, 2020, the New York Times reported that airports in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles would begin screening passengers arriving from Wuhan, China, for infection with a mysterious respiratory virus that had killed two people and sickened at least 45 overseas. By late February, the CDC confirmed the first case of COVID-19 in the United States without a known link to travel abroad, and on March 13 the president declared a national state of emergency. For social workers, as well as for others, those early days were filled with fear and confusion: Can you meet with clients if you sit six feet apart? Should you open the windows, should you wear a mask, can you find or make your own mask, can you shake hands, are you wiping down doorknobs between sessions? When you leave the office, do you dare go to the grocery store, do you wash your groceries, and, by the way, have you been able to find any toilet paper? The national state of emergency was quickly followed by state and local government lockdowns. On March 14, my suite mates and I, sensing we would not return to the office anytime soon, grabbed our potted plants before we left work and spent the weekend deciding which HIPAA-compliant virtual platform we would use for therapy sessions. By the following week, we were meeting all our clients online, not yet realizing that our profession had just changed forever.
This is the context for Social Work in the Age of Disconnection: Narrative Case Studies, which brings together the stories of nine social workers, describing the disconnections during the age of COVID, the inequalities and social injustices that the pandemic laid bare, and the ways in which technology both hindered connection and brought us together. The first and most obvious disconnection that we social workers experienced in the spring of 2020 was the abrupt loss of the physical presence of our clients, which raised concerns about whether we could work effectively in this new, disembodied way.
I