Sociological Surveillance of the Pandemic: Exploring Interconnectedness, Panic, and Waves of Crisis

The significance of examining the COVID-19 pandemic from a sociological perspective extends beyond medical issues. It primarily encompasses the social dimension, focusing on the way individuals interact, and the pandemic's influence on social, political, economic, and cultural realms. This includes the transformation of social institutions and structures, as well as the dynamics of social processes in both management and self-organization. The main subject of the article is the problem of studying the impact of a pandemic on modern society with its informational, cognitive-innovative, and hyper-realistic certainty. The author explores the phenomenon of the pandemic, its impact as a global threat and danger on micro, meso, and macro-social structures and organizations, on the main institutions of society, and on international institutions. The pandemic becomes a process of social "freezing" in the broad sense, meaning any relationships among people, but also entails social, political, economic, and cultural constraints; both public and international constraints of states and international institutions.