National communities are controlled by the government, rendering them ineffective as communities of care

Diaries showed that the territorialisation of vertical power at a national level was managed by building upon a sense of emergency with a need for exceptional responses. Frequently likened to a response to war or natural disaster, obedience was induced through a pervasive sense of fear and anxiety (Agamben, 2021). The diaries described how governments imposed stringent measures on populations’ daily behaviour and freedoms, which left them reeling. ES mentions that even the woods in her Spanish homeland were cordoned off with police tape to stop people from walking there. Many of the countries in which our diarists lived imposed overnight curfews. In Britain and the US the more liberal regimes under populist leaders (Trump and Johnson) at first rejected the strong lockdowns imposed on most European countries, but before long, restricting personal movement was seen as the only way to combat the disease. It seems that everywhere except for the same technocratic ideas for control were adopted – although to a lesser extent in Sweden. In the UK, the restriction of social life to “bubbles” relied more on self-policing through voluntary subjectivisa- tion but in other countries such as China or Spain, measures were enforced by real police on the streets. Our diarists reflected on the development of a “COVID nationalism” as each country developed variations on the response. They reported obsessively tuning into daily news broadcasts and learning of the lates regulations and death tolls as information horizons shrank. Diarists fervidly followed public broadcasts as the top-down vertical spread of power replaced the daily conversations and encounters that existed previously. Thus, there was a radical re-focus of the idea of national community with 13 C. Wallace et al. Governmentality Versus Community: The Impact of the COVID... daily top-down instructions controlling every day behaviour in the “thanatopolitics” of death and infection.