“It’s Your Breath in Our Lungs”: Sean Feucht’s Praise and Worship Music Protests and the Theological Problem of Pandemic Response in the U.S.

In response to U.S. government restrictions imposed as part of a nationwide response to the COVID-19 pandemic, charismatic worship leader Sean Feucht began a series of worship concerts. Feucht positioned these protests as expressions of Christian religious freedom in opposition to mandated church closings and a perceived double-standard regarding the large gatherings of protesters over police violence against Black and Brown persons. Government restrictions challenged the sine qua non liturgical act of encounter with God for evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Charismatics: congregational singing in Praise and Worship. However, as Feucht’s itinerant worship concerts traversed urban spaces across the U.S. to protest these restrictions, the events gained a double valence. Feucht and event attendees sought to channel God’s power through musical worship to overturn government mandates and, along the way, they invoked longstanding social and racial prejudices toward urban spaces. In this essay, I argue that Feucht’s events reveal complex theological motivations that weave together liturgical-theological, social, and political concerns. Deciphering this complex tapestry requires a review of both the history of evangelical engagement with urban spaces and the theological history of Praise and Worship. Together, these two sets of historical resources generate a useful frame for considering how Feucht, as a charismatic musical worship leader, attempts to wield spiritual power through musical praise to change political situations and the social conditions.

Relationship among state reopening policies, health outcomes and economic recovery through first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.

State governments in the U.S. have been facing difficult decisions involving tradeoffs between economic and health-related outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite evidence of the effectiveness of government-mandated restrictions mitigating the spread of contagion, these orders are stigmatized due to undesirable economic consequences. This tradeoff resulted in state governments employing mandates at widely different ways. We compare the different policies states implemented during periods of restriction (“lockdown”) and reopening with indicators of COVID-19 spread and consumer card spending at each state during the first “wave” of the pandemic in the U.S. between March and August 2020. We find that while some states enacted reopening decisions when the incidence rate of COVID-19 was minimal or sustained in its relative decline, other states relaxed socioeconomic restrictions near their highest incidence and prevalence rates experienced so far. Nevertheless, all states experienced similar trends in consumer card spending recovery, which was strongly correlated with reopening policies following the lockdowns and relatively independent from COVID-19 incidence rates at the time. Our findings suggest that consumer card spending patterns can be attributed to government mandates rather than COVID-19 incidence in the states. We estimate the recovery in states that reopened in late April was more than the recovery in states that did not reopen in the same period– 15% for consumer card spending and 18% for spending by high income households. This result highlights the important role of state policies in minimizing health impacts while promoting economic recovery and helps planning effective interventions in subsequent waves and immunization efforts.

Updated Model for the USA Summer 2021 CoVID-19 Resurgence

Over the course of the CoVID-19 pandemic, we utilized widely-available real-time data to create models for predicting its spread, and to estimate the time evolution for each of the USA CoVID-19 waves. Our recent medrxiv.org preprint (10.1101_2021.08.16.21262150) examined the USA Summer 2021 resurgence, from ~6/7/2021 up through ~8/15/2021 (Stage 1). Our preprint covering this period showed that CoVID-19 could infect virtually all susceptible non-vaccinated persons, who were practicing minimal Social Distancing and NO Mask-Wearing. The most recent USA Summer 2021 resurgence data, from ~8/13/2021 up through 10/7/2021 (Stage 2), shows a significant "flattening of the curve". Since no new government mandates were involved, our interpretation is that some vaccine-hesitant people have now elected to become vaccinated. The Social Distancing parameter in our model showed a ~6.67X increase between Stage 1 and Stage 2, indicating that this parameter also can serve as an indicator of vaccination rates. The other parameter in our model, which is associated with Mask-Wearing, increased from zero to a finite but relatively small value. Using the 10/7/2021 USA CoVID-19 overall mortality rate of ~1.60942% gives these updated predictions for the total number of USA CoVID-19 cases and deaths: N(Total by 3/21/2022)~ 52,188,000; N(Deaths by 3/21/2022)~ 839,900 ; N(Total by 3/21/2024)~ 52,787,000; N(Deaths by 3/21/2024)~ 849,600 ; assuming no new 2021 Winter Resurgence occurs (with 3 Figures).

Pandemic Among the Amish: A Look at the Effects of COVID-19 on Amish Communities in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the First Four Months

March 2020 will be remembered as one of the most unusual months in living memory. When COVID-19 spread across the country, its reach and impact affected every region and every person in some way. The "new normal" forced much of the world to face a new reality of stay-at-home orders, food shortages, and rising death rates. Initially, the pandemic hit congested urban centers hardest, but the effects of the coronavirus were also felt among the rural Amish communities of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. This study offers a preliminary look at how the pandemic affected these communities, focusing on the following themes: sources of news and information; effects of government mandates; and impact of the virus on the day-to-day lives of the Amish during the first four months of the pandemic, from late March 2020 through late July 2020. Findings suggest that the Amish experienced a mix of fear and hope, skepticism and optimism, but also a resolve in their faith, which they felt assured would carry them through the uncertainties of the coming months.

Incorporating Ethics in Disaster Communication Strategy: The Case of the U.S. Government in Deepwater Horizon

BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010 was a major test of the National Incident Management System (NIMS), which the United States federal government mandates for response to all disasters. At the time, this disaster was perhaps the greatest event in scope and duration under NIMS disaster management guidelines since they were revised in 2008 (the third edition was published in 2017). Ten years later, NIMS provides procedures for operating a joint information center (JIC), but still offers no guidelines for ethical communication. This case study examines the ethical implications of 178 news releases distributed by the Deepwater Horizon Incident JIC. Qualitative analysis found that communication was conducted in an open, ethical manner, with few exceptions. Conflicts emerged, however, that may have compromised ethical standards. The authors conclude with recommendations to inform ethical decision making by JIC communicators.

Electricity consumption of Singaporean households reveals proactive community response to COVID-19 progression

Understanding how populations’ daily behaviors change during the COVID-19 pandemic is critical to evaluating and adapting public health interventions. Here, we use residential electricity-consumption data to unravel behavioral changes within peoples’ homes in this period. Based on smart energy-meter data from 10,246 households in Singapore, we find strong positive correlations between the progression of the pandemic in the city-state and the residential electricity consumption. In particular, we find that the daily new COVID-19 cases constitute the most dominant influencing factor on the electricity demand in the early stages of the pandemic, before a lockdown. However, this influence wanes once the lockdown is implemented, signifying that residents have settled into their new lifestyles under lockdown. These observations point to a proactive response from Singaporean residents—who increasingly stayed in or performed more activities at home during the evenings, despite there being no government mandates—a finding that surprisingly extends across all demographics. Overall, our study enables policymakers to close the loop by utilizing residential electricity usage as a measure of community response during unprecedented and disruptive events, such as a pandemic.

Performative Control and Rhetoric in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Response to COVID-19

This article analyses how specific nodal points of performative control developed and consequently structured the discourse on Aotearoa New Zealand’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It identifies these points by adopting a rhetorical-performative approach to uncover three particular performances of control that articulated the pandemic in Aotearoa New Zealand, from the diagnosis of the first COVID-19 case in the country in February 2020 through to October 2020. This period of analysis covers the emergence, subsequent nationwide lockdown, elimination, and re-emergence of the virus. There are three distinct nodal points that unfold as key to the nation’s ability to control COVID-19: the hegemonic “us”; iwi regionalism; and the rhetoric of kindness. A mixed approach of content analysis of government data, Facebook data, and key imagery is employed to constitute these nodal points’ relevance and how they structured the performative control that threaded through the nation’s initial response as a whole. The article demonstrates how Aotearoa New Zealand, considered by popular assessment to have been successful in its response to COVID-19, managed to eliminate the virus twice in 2020, but not without aspects of the antagonisms that have beset other nations. These include the exacerbation of internal dichotomies and questions about the legality of Government mandates. As the country’s response to COVID-19 is traced, the employment of a rhetorical-performative framework to identify the key nodal points also highlights how the framework could be applied to Aotearoa New Zealand’s continuing response as the pandemic endures.

Assessment of Regional Fisheries Management Organizations Efforts toward the Precautionary Approach and Science-Based Stock Management and Compliance Measures

The sustainable management of the ocean as a global food source has been prominent in recent debates due to the disproportionate rate of human consumption, depletion of fish stocks and shortcomings in conservation efforts. Criticisms from various sectors on the effectiveness of Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMO) in relation to their mandates have prompted performance reviews (PRs) to evaluate their efforts in fisheries management. Among concerns are slow implementation of comprehensive harvest strategies which use science-based indicators and management principles. Moreover, RFMOs are expected to apply the precautionary approach, in the hopes of anticipating, monitoring, preventing and mitigating potential threats. The emergent themes are revealed through content analysis pertaining to cooperation and compliance being essential to fisheries management activities in conjunction with choosing the right operational approaches and the proper implementation of various fisheries regulations. Government mandates and stakeholder’s recommendations support fisheries management organizations to function more effectively. This article discusses the role of coercive, normative and mimetic pressures in RFMOs activities, as described in recent performance reviews. It then analyses how RFMOs have implemented the precautionary approach together with science-based stock management and compliance measures, utilizing recent PRs to assess progress on relevant recommendations.

Hedging: Organizational Responses to the Formulation, Implementation, and Enforcement of Government Mandated Changes

This chapter develops a process model of the hedging behavior of organizations in response to government mandates. To better align the behavior of organizations with the interests of society, governments make many demands on organizations to change their behavior. However, the changes governments require generally do not correspond to the changes organizations want to make, or those that they actually end up making. The process model describes how the variety of external requirements imposed on organizations by government leads to hedging behavior—that is a tendency to simultaneously take actions that align with the regulation while simultaneously taking actions to resist the regulation.

Association of State-Issued Mask Mandates with COVID-19 Case Counts

We have interpreted and extended an analysis published on the US CDC website 5 March 2021, which calculated the benefits of imposed mask mandates. Historical studies of masking in the general population have produced contradictory results with respect to their effectiveness in stemming spread of respiratory viral infections. The CDC study is based on a comparison of Daily Growth Rate (DGR) in number of COVID cases (or deaths) before and after imposition of mask mandates. We show that the downward trend in DGR began before masking and continued after masking. We add controls to the CDC methodology by comparing states that imposed mask mandates to states that did not. We report evidence of short-term benefit for the first 30 days that is lost when DGR increased in the fall more in masked states than unmasked. Overall, we find that the benefits reported by CDC can be completely explained by saturation effects, weather changes, and other factors apart from the government mandates that the study was designed to evaluate.