Item

HIST30060: Negative Test Result

Title (Dublin Core)

HIST30060: Negative Test Result

Disclaimer (Dublin Core)

DISCLAIMER: This item may have been submitted in response to a school assignment prompt. See Linked Data.

Description (Dublin Core)

This is a screenshot of a negative PCR test result from August 2020. At this time, test results would typically take 24 hours to process, with the government requiring that the patient isolate until they received the result of their test.

I, like most residents in Melbourne, suffered a profound emotional impact from the bombardment of public messaging about the pandemic. The advertising campaigns by the state government as well as opinions expressed on social media suggested that a failure to follow health protocols would result in tremendous negative effects. For example, failing to get tested could be the reason that someone's grandmother died from exposure to the pandemic. With such high stakes attached to my everyday behaviour and compliance to health orders, whenever I felt even slightly unwell, it would trigger a barrage of intense anxiety. The health order to self-isolate for a week after a positive test result, as well as the Andrews governments' policy of reopening contingent on the number of positive test results in the community, further increased anxiety around any form of cold symptoms.

To the day, this image evokes feelings of fear and relief. Something so mundane as a text message represented either a ticket to freedom or a binding health order. In this case, the text message represented a reassurance that my sickness was the regular, boring sort, and that I was not an accidental killer of grandmothers. It represents the use of everyday technology, both sophisticated and mundane, in the pandemic response.

Date (Dublin Core)

August 18, 2020

Creator (Dublin Core)

Margaret Chambers

Contributor (Dublin Core)

Self

Event Identifier (Dublin Core)

HIST30060

Partner (Dublin Core)

University of Melbourne

Type (Dublin Core)

Screenshot
Text

Controlled Vocabulary (Dublin Core)

English Emotion
English Public Health & Hospitals
English Education--Universities

Curator's Tags (Omeka Classic)

Melbourne
Australia
PCR test
social media
emotions
anxiety
fear
relief

Contributor's Tags (a true folksonomy) (Friend of a Friend)

Melbourne
Health Measures
Pandemic Response
Australia
Testing
Pathology
PCR Test
Negative Test Result
Quarantine
Isolation
Fear
Anxiety

Linked Data (Dublin Core)

HIST 30060 University of Melbourne Syllabus

Date Submitted (Dublin Core)

10/26/2022

Date Modified (Dublin Core)

10/29/2022
11/01/2022
11/02/2022

Date Created (Dublin Core)

08/18/2020

Item sets

Covid 19

This item was submitted on October 26, 2022 by Margaret Chambers using the form “Share Your Story” on the site “A Journal of the Plague Year”: https://www.covid-19archive.org/s/archive

Click here to view the collected data.

New Tags

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