Therapeutical Picture of Epidemic: Perceptions of COVID-19 among Russian Primary Medical Care Workers

Abstract

The paper discusses the topic of medical workers’ perceptions of COVID-19 epidemic. It is based on the empirical data from semistructured interviews with physicians and other medical staff. The  interviews were conducted in 2022 as part of the field research about the influence of COVID-19 pandemic on medical providers in small towns and countryside in two regions of Russia. Instead of applying standard dichotomy ‘expert vs lay knowledge’ as a tool for analysis of medical workers’ perceptions, authors use the analytical framework of the fractal matrix table. This fractal matrix table reconstructs different pictures of the world which are attributed to people with specific social roles according to how they participated in the epidemic and what is the subject of their expertise. The therapeutic picture, which reflects how the ideal type of doctor (i. e. person who treats patients) sees the reality, is one of them. This  speculative scheme allows to suppose what phenomena exist in the therapeutic picture of COVID-19 epidemic and look for it in the empirical data.
The resulting image of the epidemic may be interpreted as strange, because many phenomena that are significant for society are absent from the therapeutic picture of the epidemic, and the angle of view on other phenomena changes them beyond recognition. The work allows to see that the vision of the epidemic may differ depending on the place and the role of people in it, and to doubt the possibility of the only correct “scientific” picture of this large-scale social event.