Chart 3 -.

Main contributions of some authors on the risk theory.

Author	Main contributions	How does it help to understand the current context?
R. Castel⁽²²⁾	There are two types of risk: social (illness, loss of job, death); and modern (a product of industrialization and globalization, such as global warming) ones.	Greater individualization of modern societies brings as a consequence more uncertainty about how to face risks.
	Stage of “safe society” through the establishment of the Social Security/Welfare State.	Greater emotional burden on the uncertain future.
	The phase of modernity in today’s societies is characterized by greater “individualization” and loss of the collective sense.	Paradox of the current epidemic: With COVID-19, people are asked to think from the collective (stay home to save the lives of others).
A. Giddens⁽²⁰⁾	Modernity is a culture of risk (p. 35).	Knowledge takes the form of permanent hypotheses about everyday events.
	Modernity is a culture of risk (p. 35).	People build their explanations about COVID-19 based on what they hear in the media.
	Risk and trust, two concepts united in times of uncertainty.	Paradox of the current epidemic: With COVID-19, fake news is mixed with scientific data, infodemic affects people’s trust in the information received to prevent risks.
		Ambivalent.
		Stopping routine and daily activities leads to distress.
		People need to feel confident to perform well.
U. Beck⁽¹⁶⁾	“Global threat situations that arise for all humanity” (e.g. nuclear accidents).	Not only were COVID-19 cases identified in less than three months in most countries, but also their inhabitants were quarantined, at the same time, in their homes.
U. Beck⁽¹⁶⁾	“They endanger life on this Earth, and all its forms of manifestation.”	Although the author referred mainly to the danger derived from nuclear activity and the consequences of climate change, COVID-19 has endangered social life, due to the prevention measures that were taken, necessary to reduce the risk of contagion: restricting social encounters, physical contact, etc., which are the essence of human life.
D. Le Breton⁽²³⁾	All societies have developed symbolic systems or a ‘management’ model to eliminate ‘danger’, as in the past: wars, famines, diseases such as the Black Death. To pray (religion), discriminate and blame the other, minimize the threat in relation to other priorities (economy).	Risk control and management has been the object of political struggle between a scientific approach that recommends confinement to ‘flatten the curve’ and to avoid hospitals saturation to be able to attend to the serious forms of COVID-19, and an approach defended by some Heads of State who minimized the danger of the virus and the risk of contagion that this pandemic represents, stating that it was a form of flu, and rejecting quarantine.
D. Le Breton⁽²³⁾	“Risk” is the key element of the modern societies symbolic system and has become the object of political, ethical, and social struggles to define the risky situations and the ways to prevent them.
Z. Bauman⁽¹⁵⁾	Intolerance and ambivalence, two concepts derived from modernity.	Ambivalence results in disarrangement, inner discomfort from not being able to interpret the signs and choose alternatives.
	Ambivalence: possibility of relating an event to more than one category.
	The disposable lives.
M. Douglas⁽¹⁹⁾	Risk is built through a process of perception, interpretation, understanding, and actions in the people’s immediate reality.	The population group to whom we want to communicate the health risk shall be defined so as to define strategies.
M. Douglas⁽¹⁹⁾	Through experience and the family values system, one learns how to take care of him/herself.	As time goes by and we get used to living with the virus and the measures, an idea of ‘subjective immunity’ is created that the measures to prevent contagion can be relaxed.

Source: own elaboration from the bibliographic production of the referred authors.