When Deaths Are Dehumanized: Deathcare During COVID-19 as a Public Value Failure

• Author: Abdul-Akeem Sadiq,Jenna Tyler,Rebecca Entress,Staci M. Zavattaro
• DOI: 10.1177/00953997211023185
• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Date: 01 October 2021
• Subject Matter: Perspectives

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997211023185

Administration & Society

2021, Vol. 53(9) 1443 –1462

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00953997211023185

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Perspectives

When Deaths Are

Dehumanized: Deathcare

During COVID-19 as a

Public Value Failure

Staci M. Zavattaro1, Rebecca Entress1,

Jenna Tyler1, and Abdul-Akeem Sadiq1

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, which is still gripping the world, brought death

front and center into many people’s lives. In the United States, however, some

of the deaths were treated as “more tragic” than others given someone’s

economic use value coupled with dehumanizing language. Using Debord’s

Society of the Spectacle, this is understood as a public values failure when

economic productivity eclipses public health and humanity. Introducing a

conceptual framework, this article explores this death narrative and implores

public administrators to think about death management in a humane framing.

Keywords

dehumanization, COVID-19, deathcare management, mass fatality management,

public values, economic values

Introduction

On March 16, 2020, then-President Donald Trump sent a tweet referring to

COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus.” Other political officials in the United

States picked up this language, sharing it broadly online, on mainstream

1University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA

Corresponding Author:

Staci M. Zavattaro, University of Central Florida, 528 W Livingston St Orlando, FL 32801,

USA.

Email: staci.zavattaro@ucf.edu

1023185AAS0010.1177/00953997211023185Administration & SocietyZavattaro et al.

research-article2021

1444 Administration & Society 53(9)

press, and in talking points. Hswen et al. (2021) found the tweet was the cata-

lyst for an increase in anti-Asian hate on social media, especially Twitter.

From March 9 to March 20, 2020, tweets including #chinesevirus totaled

495,287, compared with 247,958 with #covid19. More than half of those

were directly related to anti-Asian sentiment meant to cause fear and leading

to increases in attacks (and murders in Atlanta during March 2021) on Asian

Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Narratives surrounding COVID-19-related deaths vary depending upon

who falls victim. Inherent in these dehumanizing narratives is the use value

of humans, and in this article, we use Debord’s (2010) Society of the Spectacle

to understand public values failure when a person is dehumanized to focus

largely on their economic and productive use value to society. In a society

bent on production, the person performing the economic acts of work and

labor is seen as a commodity themselves (Marx & Engels, 2004). As such, the

person becomes expendable—a proverbial cog in the machine seeking to

dehumanize people. These economic-first values clash in the case of COVID-

19 with public values, the principles, goals, and ideals from which the public

derives value and for which the public is entitled (Jørgensen & Sørensen,

2012; Meynhardt, 2009). Examples of public values include accountability,

dialogue, transparency, and citizen engagement (Jørgensen & Bozeman,

2007). Debord’s (2010) explanation of the society of the spectacle helps

understand why some people are humanized in death and others are seen as

“deserving” to die. Such a shift has desensitized people in the United States

to death and dying so much so that the deathcare management system has

been overwhelmed and the dead sometimes not treated with dignity (Entress

et al., 2020a).

The article begins with setting the context of COVID-19, with a specific

focus on the United States. We then use Debord (2010) to introduce a 2 × 2

framework to highlight narratives surrounding the social construction of

death—to showcase the public values failure when economic vitality is pri-

oritized over public health. Stories from popular newspapers are used to

highlight examples shared within the framework.

A Brief Overview of COVID-19 and Its

Administrative Impacts

As the COVID-19 pandemic began gripping the world in late 2019, it became

clear there would be a surge in deaths. During March 2020, Italy became a

global hotspot with rapidly rising COVID-19 cases and subsequent deaths. In

one region, army trucks were brought in to assist with transporting corpses to

various regions for cremation, as local crematoria became overwhelmed