During Disaster: Refining the Concept of Focusing Events to Better Explain Long-Duration Crises

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most significant public health crises in modern history, killing over 2 million people worldwide (Johns Hopkins, 2021). Unsurprisingly, a chorus of popular commentators has come to label it a “focusing event” capable of yielding broad social and political change across virtually every sector of society (Jenkins, 2020; Reville, 2020; Burgess, 2020; Olshan, 2020; Zenko, 2020). Jeremy Olshan (2020) of MarketWatch writes: “Social scientists say a c...