In category: Science and Data

By David Houston Jones The need to visualise COVID-19 has permeated official coverage, frequently in the form of charts showing daily infection growth rates and deaths. The need to reduce the infection rate has been expressed in terms of flattening the ‘curve’ or, for Boris Johnson, of the attempt to ‘squash the sombrero’. News coverage […]

By Dora Vargha “We know a good deal about beginnings: those first signal cases of pneumonia in Guangdong, influenza in Veracruz, and hemorrhagic fever in Guinea, respectively marking the origins of the SARS outbreak of 2002–4, the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2008–9, and the Ebola pandemic of 2014–16. Recent history tells us a lot about […]

By Sabina Leonelli with Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Thomas Cousin and Michelle Pentecost ‘Struggles for a more just, fair, inclusive, or caring politics in the time of Covid-19, need to be grounded in the everyday work of building institutions, supporting the vulnerable amongst us, and cultivating a deeper ethic of mutuality.’ What have been the epidemiological and […]

By Ginny Russell Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, the UK has the highest reported rate of “excess” deaths in Western Europe, if not the world. These are deaths over and above the number predicted for the time of year, but at the peak of the pandemic, almost a third were not due to […]

By John Dupré Viruses are usually portrayed as stable and distinct individuals that do not fit the more integrated and collaborative picture of nature implied by symbiosis. In this paper (by John Dupré and Stephan Guttinger) we will contest this view. This paper first discusses recent findings in virology that show that viruses can be […]

By Kirsten Bell and Judith Green One novel outcome of the current pandemic has been the proliferation of accessible published research. Many academic journal editors have noted increased numbers of submissions: but also concern that these have come from those with the resources, space and cultural capital needed to turn research into ‘outputs’. A new editorial […]

By Laura Salisbury As social media and different forms of populism continue to undermine trust in top-down expertise, it’s clear that facts are coming under increasing pressure. But how are the effects of this being felt in health contexts, including the new conditions of COVID-19 ? What is happening to the idea of ‘evidence’? In […]

By Arthur Rose and Luna Dolezal During the COVID-19 crisis,  metaphors of “saving face”, and its corollary “losing face”, have emerged as motivating forces that explain the policy decisions of some nation states and organizations. However, an Orientalist tendency to associate “face saving” with Asian countries has led to a pseudo division between countries that rationally […]

By Sabina Leonelli Data have been at the centre of the pandemic response, in terms of which data are being collected, how they are being analysed and compared, and which inferences are being drawn from them. There has also been a strong emphasis on the use of Artificial Intelligence in procuring and interpreting data; data […]

By Sabina Leonelli This journal special issue brings together scholarly reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic from scholars in the history, philosophy and social studies of biology and biomedicine. Themes may include, but are not limited to, the role of modelling, data practices and uncertainty in pandemic science and policy responses; the genealogies and reconfigurations of […]