#Mail stamps series

Monaco’s stamp, the only photograph, shows King Albert II holding a globe rotated to Asia where the epidemic began with a handwritten message urging “patience, trust, courage, solidarity”(20).Īll the images reflect a sentiment of global solidarity mass public health efforts and the hope of overcoming this new medical, scientific, and human challenge. In general the stamps signal governments' resolve to fight the epidemic (eg, clenched fists in stamps 26, 35, 41), reassure their populace, and educate and motivate them about public health best practices. A French Polynesian image illustrates 2 women with matching floral print masks separated by 6 coconuts, the recommended physical distance of 1 m (43). Others communicate public health mitigation measures, emphasizing recognition of symptoms (stamps 16, 30, 66), wearing of masks (12, 13, 36, 37, 46-51, 56-59, 67), social distancing, hand washing or surface disinfection, and other barrier measures (14-15, 42, 47, 63-68). Examples include a split masked face, half-caregiver half-soldier (stamp 40) a soldier wearing a gas mask paired with a physician flashing a victory sign (21 see also 58) masks symbolizing army, police, firefighters, and other civil servants (36-37) and a “superhero” health care worker with a floating red cape (1). Many of the images evoke combat imagery, honoring health care workers and armed forces and blurring the distinction between them as essential to combating the pandemic. A Swiss “solidarity” stamp features a Bauhaus-like image of a globe circumscribed by icons of people, the whole resolving into the coronavirus with its spike protein array (38). The virus itself is represented in both stylized (stamps 24, 38, 41, and 58) and more realistic illustrations (13, 28, 34-35) in the issue.

#Mail stamps series

Two national stamps (Morocco and Switzerland ) and the United Nations series (6 stamps: 14-19) have surcharges, indicated with a + sign, to raise additional monies committed to charity funds. Many are commemorative, meaning they are issued for a short period and are not ongoing national postage issues.

By comparison, the first AIDS-related stamp did not appear until years after the discovery of HIV. The first COVID-19 stamp was issued by Iran (stamp 21) on March 17, quickly after the first isolation and identification of SARS-CoV-2, 4 followed by China on May 11 (stamps 24 and 25), with the 65 remaining released through December 2020. We obtained images of most of the series from Yvert et Tellier, a global postage stamp company that maintains reference catalogs of global issues. We included only official stamps whose status was verified on postal sites because nonverified copies sometimes circulate without validation by the national postal office or as part of personalized prints, which is allowed in some jurisdictions when approved by a local private organization. In the process we incidentally identified postage issues commemorating pre–SARS-CoV-2 respiratory disease outbreaks including 1918 influenza, SARS, and H5N1 (eFigure 1 in the Supplement). We consulted an online list of national postal services and searched the philatelic section of each through December 2020 to identify 21 countries with pandemic-related postage series issues comprising 62 stamps, and 1 nonnational organization (the United Nations) with 1 issue comprising 6 stamps, for a total of 22 issues or series comprising 68 stamps. We conducted a review of official postage stamps issued in 2020 related to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the rise of email the popular cultural significance of postage stamps has diminished, but they still remain a way for governments and nongovernment organizations to communicate on a broad scale and to raise funds. Educational and financial messages about infectious diseases on stamps appeared in 1904 when Danish postal clerk Einar Holbøll developed the idea of raising money for tuberculosis by adding a surcharge to the sale of a “Christmas seal” stamp 2 (eFigure 1 in the Supplement). It is a mass medium used to commemorate events or raise public awareness about topics of wide social interest or influence. The commemoration of major events takes many forms, including the issuing of postage stamps. In living memory, no epidemic has generated a medical, scientific, social, and political response as massive, rapid, and global as that of COVID-19, which quickly became a global public health emergency recognized by the World Health Organization in January 2020.

Shared Decision Making and Communication.Scientific Discovery and the Future of Medicine.Health Care Economics, Insurance, Payment.Clinical Implications of Basic Neuroscience.Challenges in Clinical Electrocardiography.