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.
We at last feel confident in formally presenting some of our academic efforts in this daunting arena, something which could be called “Covid STS.” In the famous book Framing Disease, its editor and renowned historian of medicine Charles Rosenberg reminds us that disease as a social diagnosis can evoke institutional responses to pathogens and actions for social reform, while as a social actor disease is “a factor in a structured configuration of social interactions.” (Rosenberg Citation1992: p. xx). Guided by the concept of discovering the individuality of a disease, in this case Covid, we pay equal attention to the infrastructures of healthcare in East Asia, investigating not only how governments and societies there made what decisions in tackling the pandemic (e.g. Jasanoff et al. Citation2021; Tiberghien Citation2021) but also such non-human agents as ventilators, masks, virus testing kits, screening and reporting systems, and vaccines, which, together with their human counterparts, have created different trajectories in coping with troublesome pathogens.
