Long-term care workers in Spain as <i>contaminating agents</i> during the covid-19 pandemic

During the covid-19 pandemic, long-term care workers played a crucial role in ensuring well-being. Despite this, they came to be seen as bearers of discomfort, harm and even death. Long-term care workers themselves accepted that, notwithstanding their assigned role and their own best intentions, their presence brought with it a risk of contagion. In this article, we interrogate how these care workers came to be perceived and perceive themselves as a threat to those they cared for. We also describe their strategies for risk management and the responsible provision of care. We used a qualitative methodology centred on 36 semi-structured interviews carried out with long-term care workers in Spain. We found that both official measures designed to reduce transmission and informal practices of control played an important role in the emergence of the perception that these workers constituted a threat and ultimately reinforced the preexisting marginalisation that they faced. In addition, we saw that strategies for covering, removing and cleaning the body aimed at ensuring well-being were simultaneously practical and symbolic. The article makes a contribution to the relatively unexplored nexus between care, the body and risk.