This issue opens the year 2022, the sixteenth year since EASTS’ birth and the third of living with the Covid virus and its variants. As an STS journal in and for East Asia, over the past two years we have kept watching this virus and following how people—first in Asia and Europe, then in the US and all over the world—have reacted to it. We have been in no rush to report our findings: as we said back in mid-2020, we were not pushing to publish speculative scholarship, but instead biding our time, incubating sensible, reliable work that is right for the tasks at hand and the lessons to be learned from.
