The Pandemic Management Theory. COVID-19 and biocentric development

Abstract

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 virus first appeared in December 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. On March 11, 2020, the WHO officially declared the outbreak a pandemic due to the rapid increase in infections outside of China. Since its discovery, many scientific papers have been carried out on medical containment and mechanisms of action, especially regarding the medical treatment of the virus infection and its symptoms as well as the organization of treatment in hospitals. There are also a number of studies on how pandemics of this magnitude affect people who are psychologically affected and burdened by the restrictive governmental measures (Bidzan et al., 2020; Schroder et al., 2020) in the short and long term. Rohr et al. (2020) provide an overview of the psychosocial consequences of quarantine measures in a systematic review, with quarantine measures being consistently associated with negative psychosocial results in 13 evaluated studies. These included the occurrence of depressive symptoms, anxiety, anger, stress, post-traumatic stress, social isolation, loneliness, and stigma. So far, however, there is no evidence-based and comprehensive theory to describe the psychological effect mechanisms behind the effects of coping with or processing a pandemic, as e.g. in the event of terrorist attacks (Greenberg, 2012; Tichy, 2013). In this theory, fear of death is assumed to be the central trigger for changes in self-esteem and the change in cultural values after terrorist attacks and has been proven in studies. Fears also play a central role in the COVID-19 crisis, and in the Pandemic Management Theory (PMT), but there are many more fears that occur and have an impact on the bur-den experience and on individual and collective identity and coping processes. The crisis is more complex in terms of its existential effects on social and working life and so it can be explained that the theory must also be more complex. The Pandemic Management Theory contains two circles, which are shown in Figure 1.