“In This Together” diagnosis and the imaginary nation

In addition to the visible ways in which people have been united by COVID, there are also hidden structural and rhetorical links enabled by diagnosis. Diagnosis itself places the individual case into a generalized category, uniting the individual with many others so afflicted. In the case of COVID-19, diagnosis also creates new networks and relations by contact tracing. But diagnosis is also a measure of and technique for imaging the nation. Through multiple mechanisms, it constructs unify-ing concepts of nation, of citizen, and of class.