Meg Holden, Atiya Mahmood, Ghazaleh Akbarnejad, Lainey Martin and Meghan Winters
Circles designed to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus by encouraging social distancing line San Francisco’s Dolores Park on May 21, 2020. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
The public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic introduced the idea of bubbles to our social lives.
These strict directives to stick to our bubbles are essential to prevent the transmission of COVID-19. At the same time, this way of thinking disrupts our understanding of the kinds and quantities of social interactions needed to make healthy cities possible.
Health and social networks
In 2013-14, the Vancouver Coastal Health and Fraser Health Authorities asked 33,000 people living in the Lower Mainland of B.C. a series of big-picture questions about their health, at the individual and community level. One of these questions, a marker of physical and mental health, was: