How do we remember death when it constitutes our landscape? In an age of ubiquitous mortality—not only pandemic deaths, but also deaths from meteorological disasters, deaths of migrants seeking refuge from their war-torn homes, and the more banal declines in life expectancy in broad swaths of the United States—what kinds of death do we memorialize, and what kinds do we …
Tag Archives: Epidemiology
Ludwik Fleck where are you now that we need you? Covid-19 and the genesis of epidemiological facts
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Tests for Covid-19 and the politics of big numbers
We are incessantly flooded with data on the evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic. WHO and the Johns Hopkins coronavirus resource provide information on the daily number of Covid-19 cases and deaths worldwide, while national media supply details on the dynamics of the pandemic in each state, region and city. These data …
Sanitary cordons in COVID-19: experience and the object of epidemiological interventions
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
What is the object of epidemiological interventions during an epidemic? Is it the virus, the disease, the fear, the chaos, or the threat to security? And what is the objective of those interventions? Is it to eliminate the virus, to mitigate the effects of the disease, to calm the fear, to control the chaos, or to defeat the threat?
On …
Go Suppress Yourself | A Chronicle
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
In December 2019, reports emerged of a pneumonia of unknown origin in the city of Wuhan, China. A week into 2020, a novel pathogen was identified–– “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” (SARS-CoV-2), a new coronavirus. The novel virus is highly similar in structure and sequence to the first SARS coronavirus (2003). After entering the body, typically through the mucus …
Epidemiological Publics? On the Domestication of Modelling in the era of COVID-19
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has been called “a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco” (Ioannides, 2020), while the editor of the Lancet has declared that “the handling of the COVID-19 crisis in the UK is the most serious science policy failure in a generation” (Horton, 2020). At the heart of the science policy is mathematical modelling, a scientific activity once reserved for mathematicians, epidemiologists …
Patient Zero and the Making of a Myth: History as an Archaeology of the Present
Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic
University of Chicago Press, 2017, 400 pages
…“An innocent he was not. He eventually told health investigators that during the 1970s he’d had some 2,500 sexual contacts with men in Europe, Canada, South America – and in the large centers of gay lifestyle in New York and California.