The United States and Pakistan may be oceans apart, and the COVID-19 may be impacting the two nations differently. But they are dealing with the same common invisible threat.
And that set of contrasts and similarities has piqued the interest of researchers of George Mason University’s Institute for Immigration Research to start a comprehensive assessment of the two countries’ responses to the infectious disease.
The GMU and the University of Karachi have already started looking at the responses to the disease at societal levels.
The Institute notes in a statement that with a combined population of over 500 million people, COVID-19 has both societies reeling as they face an uncertain future.
“How these two nations react will reflect their very different ways of life, as well as their common humanity,” JamesWitte, Director of the Institute for Immigration Research, says.
Witte, who has been holding online discussions with Pakistani academics at the University of Karachi, says the coronavirus breakout has shocked both countries, and now COVID-19 is putting the cultural institutional framework of both the United States and Pakistan through a stress test.
Social scientists have the opportunity to assess the strengths and weaknesses of this framework and think about therapies for the two nations going forward, according to the Center.
Named The Parallel Pandemic Project, the study will document and understand when and how the paths of the United States and Pakistan converge and diverge over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Center says in early April of 2020 students and faculty in the social sciences at George Mason University (Mason) and the University of Karachi (UoK) began a series of informal virtual conversations and classroom exchanges to discuss how their respective societies were reacting to this new public health threat.
The project will continue with a series of regular virtual discussions among scholars at Mason and UoK through the summer of 2020
“The aim is that based on this process faculty and students from a variety of departments at both institutions will align themselves into thematic working groups to develop projects and proposals for external support.”
Some of the topics the researchers will explore include policy implementation, legislative responses, COVID-19 and religion, COVID-19 and family, and COVID-19 and education.
