COVID-19: Proportionality, Public Policy and Social Distance explores the social and political response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It details the sociological aspects of the spread of the virus, the role played by social distancing in virus mitigation, and the comparative effect of social proximity and distance on national anti-viral behavior. Peter Murphy discusses various public policy approaches to the pandemic and their successes and failures. In this engaging analysis, he investigates the way that contemporary societies think about risk, threat and harm, and how social mood affected the response to COVID-19.

Peter Murphy is the author of The Political Economy of Prosperity (2020), Limited Government (2018) Auto-Industrialism (2017), Universities and Innovation Economies (2015) and The Collective Imagination (2012), among other books. He is Adjunct Professor of Social Sciences at La Trobe University and in The Cairns Institute at James Cook University, Australia.