The coming COVID science sh*tstorm

I've let this blog go quiet the past three months.  But it seems appropriate to link to my latest piece on COVID here.

https://arena.org.au/the-coming-covid-science-shtstorm-responding-to-the-great-barrington-declaration/

Richard Scarry and COVID-19

You may know the children's books of Richard Scarry, with their detailed illustrations of the workings of Busytown, Scarry's representation of the modern world - transport systems, electricity, urban life, food production and so on.  They are totally absorbing and have given me, and my daughter, hours of pleasure.

My friend, Clark Miller, an STS scholar and a Professor at Arizona State University, has written a fascinating account of COVID-19 drawing on the work of Scarry.  They are well worth reading.  

As he writes:

"We are taught to think of coronavirus as a product of nature, its origins in our encounters with wildlife, its illness a product of the race between its ability to reproduce inside us and our immune system’s ability to vanquish it. But this biological view of COVID-19 conceals more than it reveals; it is a disciplinary blinder that renders the disease’s next moves invisible to our tools and our models. You can’t understand this pandemic until you understand Busytown and its inhabitants—those beings whose travels, interactions, ideas, and bodies (filled with zillions of novel coronavirus molecules) are shaped by the industrial systems that Scarry reveals for us and whose lives, in turn, have shaped the circumstances that gave birth to the virus, how and where it travels, and who it kills."

Start with Part 1 and I'm sure you will want to read Part 2 and Part 3 in short order. 

COVID-19 and 'The Wretched of the Earth'

This photo shows a small part of a four kilometre long queue for food parcels in a township outside Pretoria, South Africa! (and see video). Lockdown looks very different depending on where one stands.  

Is this the experience of most of the world's population?   

Is this an inevitable outcome of treating COVID-19 mainly as a health problem rather than a whole-of-society problem?

Will we be surprised if the Wretched of the Earth bite back?

People line up to receive food handouts in the Olievenhoutbos township of Midrand

Science, expertise and ignorance

Ignorance is an important driver of scientific inquiry.  If only we could fill in the knowledge gaps, it is argued, then we would know the answers to questions that we currently don't know.  One recognised problem with this account is that sometimes 'we don't know what we don't know', in Donald Rumsfeld's memorable phrase.  Another is that sometimes we are wilfully blind to what we do know, such as that relentless economic growth and environmental destruction are related.  'Unknown knowns' as Zizek called it.

The brilliant Science, Technology & Society (STS) scholar, Brian Wynne, distinguished ‘risk’ (where the odds are known and quantifiable), from ‘uncertainty’ (with known system parameters but unknown odds), from ‘ignorance’ (where we don’t know what we don’t know), from ‘indeterminacy’ (which intersects with the first three but captures contextual socio-political factors as well as the conditionality of knowledge).  Andy Stirling has called the last of these 'ambiguity': 'when experts disagree over the framing of possible options, contexts, outcomes, benefits or harms'.

With COVID-19 we have all of these in bucketloads... what all the drivers and risk factors are, what the odds are of particular risks (they seem to vary widely across countries), a great deal of not knowing what matters and what we need to know, and a large dose of indeterminacy/ambiguity, linked to whether we see COVID-19 as a health problem, a public systems problem, a whole of society problem and so on.

Here's a post on expertise for Arena magazine, that I wrote today.

And here's an extremely interesting article from the New York Times asking why the impacts of COVID-19 have been so different in different places.

Requisitioning our homes?

Many white-collar and 'knowledge workers' are currently working from home.  In this guest post Dr. Fiona Jenkins, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Convenor of the Gender Institute at the Australian National University (ANU), ponders the implications of being required by our employers to make our homes into our offices.*

We are working from home, but for many of us that doesn't mean quite what it did. Normally, working from home for me is the luxury of a quiet and studious day, alone in the house, where research and life reconnect in an inspiring way. Now that the house holds my partner's office, a home school and a self-isolating student, it feels crowded; everyone needs a place to work, the internet is jumpy and overloaded, and we are all anxious. The fridge seems to be self-emptying.

Working from home is usually thought of as a privilege - like flexible work, it's most often considered as an enlightened gift of the employer rather than as a right of the employee. How do things change when working from home is made a requirement by the employer, in order to comply with the dual exigency of a government-imposed lockdown in response to a global pandemic, and the need to keep business running?

Suppose we say that what we have actually just done by closing down workplaces and substituting "working from home" is in effect a requisition of people's homes as their place of work. This is not implausible. To requisition is to demand the supply of something by official order. It happens typically in times of emergency.

We have all been required to work from home, which means we have all been required to supply the equivalent of office space for our work.

These homes become offices with varying degrees of ease. While some have well-set-up home offices already, others are trying to set up a desk in the bedroom, or to work out time-share on the dining table, which is the only table in the house. While some occupy the home alone or with a compatible fellow adult, for others it's a much less easy space. 

These differences become salient to terms of employment when there is no option but to work from home. One important way in which we are smoothing over such issues is by borrowing language from the equity lexicon that meant one thing when we were in normal circumstances, but means quite another now that we are in an emergency context. Take "flexible working arrangements", for example. Normally these imply the opportunity for movement between home and the office; and they imply negotiation to fit one set of demands with another. Now, in this crisis, a new set of powerful exigencies rules. There is no more movement. There is only home - which in the course of a few very intense weeks, has become rather un-homely.

Flexibility now means "just make this work!". The people who usually do the most work on "flexibility" - women - are very likely doing the most work on this right now too. Although many employers are certainly being supportive, let's not forget that those who until recently took their homes for private space are not gaining a privilege right now, but losing a set of prerogatives. We are paying a price for safety in a time of crisis that could not be reasonably exhorted in normal times. We should remember that when normality returns, lest the terms of crisis management themselves are normalised, as often happens.

So "working from home" at present means something like this: employers have requisitioned the home as a condition of continuing to work, and they have taken away the office as part of what was previously offered to enable people to work. Although this new circumstance clearly should change what "flexibility" is understood to be about, we are using the same word in changed contexts, in part as a way to manage a sense of continuity and recalibrate expectations. We are talking about "working from home" as if it were continuous with what it previously meant as an optional alternative to "working in the office".

In the present crisis, policymakers are mostly quite unreflective about this core pillar of our mitigation strategy - perhaps because they are used to taking the home for granted and to imagining it in a certain way. Acting as if home is a costless resource that is free for appropriation in an emergency, ignoring how home functions as a site of relatively invisible gendered relations of care and labour and imagining home as a largely frictionless site of interpersonal relations, come all too naturally, especially in a crisis.

This has to change, and urgently, because while this pillar of our strategy for containing COVID-19 is essential, it is also fragile. We must avoid taking this resource for granted and recall some "home truths". These include that for women, home remains one of the greatest reserves of inequality. Every statistic points to the disparities in average burdens of care in the household. Every trigger we know for domestic violence is currently intensifying. Workplace flexibility is supposed to mean accommodating work/life balance; in practice it still often means meeting deadlines by breastfeeding a baby at your desk while you park your six-year-old in front of Netflix. It is clear that latter version of "flexibility" is just not sustainable as a way of managing this time of crisis, but it is what many are resorting to now. There are other crises than COVID-19 brewing in this mix.

My own employer, the Australian National University, has made helpful and impressive allowances for the new situation we find ourselves in by specifying that where people are faced with complex situations working from home, 25 hours per week will be deemed a full-time load (and pro rata for part-time). This gives clarity on what full-time now means, and the offer seems considered and generous. But if you then think of the relative costs of working from home - imposed in differential ways depending on people's particular circumstances in the asset being requisitioned - perceptions may shift.

For example, compare my situation as someone with a good salary and a home office, with someone on the lower levels of the administrative scale who has a two-bedroom townhouse. She has a child who just began school this year and a partner also working from home. Her (their) working space is the dining table. She is worried about the costs of heating if she has to be at home in the winter. The employer won't pay for extra internet access - it's got to come from her tax claim as a "home office" expense (ironically, given the dining table). She's on four days a week and although she and her partner are trying to share care by tag-teaming in this small space, she's very worried about how she's even going to manage 20 hours.

The university just requisitioned her space when it mandated working from home. Would saying things this way help us to see that we might be doing more to systemically even out the burden imposed on her and the burden imposed on me? At present, the promise is that such situations will be reviewed on an individual basis. But seeing requisition as imposing unequal burdens suggests the onus might lie with employers to elaborate some principles about enabling all to work from home while distributing the cost that imposes more evenly. We might also consider whether what is on offer here is enough flexibility on the employer's part to compensate for the "flexibility" now being imposed on the employee. In effect, trading up to two hours a working day against all the other expenses of taking work into an under-equipped home is perhaps not quite as generous toward certain people as it might seem at first.

While I am completely behind the move to lockdown, and grateful to have an employer carefully addressing the issues so that we can maintain our core work, I worry that caught up in the urgency of crisis we risk forgetting just how problematic the "working from home" pillar of our strategy for mitigation is in multiple respects. Just because we accept the necessity of action in the context of emergency should not mean that we do not question its further implications and its practice. Others indeed may be suffering much more in this crisis than those lucky enough to continue to work from home - but that does not mean we should ignore how this work's burdens are distributed. Perhaps if we use the language of "requisitioning" we can see why it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that many people feel they have just lost their homes as a result of our move to "working from home".

* This article was previously published in the Canberra Times

What are we talking about when we talk about contact-tracing apps?

The Australian government has introduced a contact-tracing app called COVIDSafe. In this guest post Dr. James Parker, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne's Law School asks what is at stake.

...........

COVIDSafe, Australia’s new ‘contact-tracing’ app, was released at 6pm last night, a matter of hours after two state governments announced they would be reducing restrictions on movement and gatherings. It’s hard to imagine the timing was a coincidence. Indeed, the government had already signalled that the app would be one of three key pillars to Australia’s ‘exit strategy’. By morning, the media was reporting it had already been downloaded more than a million times nationally, news that would surely put a smile on the Prime Minister’s face, the Guardian said. 

Whether these initial downloads translate into ‘users’ and for how long, is another matter, however. Indeed, with so many outstanding questions around the app’s functionality, we still don’t know what ‘using’ COVIDSafe really involves, or how this will affect the reliability of the data it collects and extent of the roll out.

As expected, the conversation is already pitting public health against privacy.  One friend tells me via WhatsApp that Google and Facebook already reap far more of our data anyway, so ‘if it helps, what the heck, I’ll download it’. Someone on twitter says they’d much rather take the advice of ‘doctors’ over ‘privacy activists’. Whatever happened to ‘collectivism’ protests another. According to Greg Hunt, the Health Minister, downloading the app is a lot like buying ‘war bonds’, only cheaper. ‘What we’re doing in fighting this fight is we’ll be asking people to download an app which helps us trace the virus quickly and the more people who do that, the more we can get back to a more liveable set of arrangements.’

There are already a number of major assumptions here, the most important of which is that the app will actually work if enough people download it. There has been far too little questioning of this basic premise, given that – as far I know – there is no empirical evidence to suggest that it will, and when the one thing we do know is that it failed in the only previous test-case (Singapore). 

What would ‘working’ even mean in this context? Keeping infection rates low? Keeping them low under the current emergency measures? Or also as restrictions start to lift? Even if numbers do stay low (and how low is low anyway?) and the app is used to contact and test some of those at risk, will we consider the app a success only if those people couldn’t have been found via tried and tested interview-based contact tracing? Or if digital contact tracing ends up doing the same thing, only cheaper? Is the app cheaper? To what extent is COVIDSafe about public health and to what extent about economics?

It strikes me that there’s a basic falsifiability problem here. There is simply no way of knowing whether this app has been effective. Whereas what’s certain is that it will help to further normalise state surveillance and/as ‘technological solutionism’, and that any perceived failures will be blamed, in the first instance, on uptake levels and ‘privacy activists’ undermining civic values in a time of crisis.

There are other problems: 

1)    The argument ‘from big tech’ - ie that our data is being mined for profit anyway, so we might as well donate it for the benefit of public health – is precisely the wrong way around. The unrelenting expansion of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff), platform capitalism (Srnicek), data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias) – pick your synonym – needs to be resisted. If it instead becomes the benchmark against which all privacy questions are measured, that battle is lost.

2)    The idea that doctors, epidemiologists, or even scientists in general, are the ones we should be listening to in the conversation about COVIDSafe fundamentally misunderstands the nature and scope of scientific knowledge. This is just another version of the point made by Jeremy Baskin recently about the rhetorical and political power of being able to say that the response to Covid19 is being ‘guided by the science’. Science may be able to help us understand the benefits of contact tracing. It may even be able to found an argument for some kind of app. But it can’t tell us whether the data collected by that app should be centralized (as in the case of COVIDSafe) or dispersed, how long it should be held for, what legal consequences should attach to an alert that you’ve come into contact with an infected person, what to make of the app’s enabling legislation (which will presumably be debated in Parliament at some point… though God knows when), or – more fundamentally – whether the government can be trusted to use the data it collects for purposes other than the ones it tells us about… Because as Bernard Keane argues in Crikey, the question isn’t so much whether COVIDSafe is a threat to your privacy, but whether the government is. And you don’t need to be Barnaby Joyce or Pauline Hanson to have concerns on that front.

Perhaps, unlike Joyce and Hanson, you’ve got nothing to hide. But as Lizzie O’Shea, the chair of Digital Rights Watch, points out, you would hope that the government didn’t either. And if it doesn’t, why not release the app’s source code? As indeed the department of health’s own privacy impact assessment recommended. Or, for that matter, release the infrastructure at the government’s end: the ‘whole data custody chain’? Some of the source code, two weeks after the app’s release, which is what we’re now apparently being promised, is simply not good enough.

These are no longer conversations about an app. And they have very little to do with public health, or even really privacy. They are about political accountability and transparency; about fantasies of technological fixes to social problems; and more specifically about how digital technology – and tracking and surveillance technologies especially – are increasingly imagined as essential to society’s proper functioning, despite the scant evidence to this effect… not to mention the political consequences.

Science, expertise and trust in COVID times - Part 3 - why do experts differ?

In the last instalment I argued that whilst experts have valuable contributions to make in relation to COVID-19, trust in experts and faith in science should not be unconditional. Trust needs to be earned.  Here I look at why experts differ.

We are already seeing lots of differences in expert opinion.  Some say we should wear facemasks, others not.  Considerations may not be purely health related, that is how much various masks reduce the likelihood of transmission.  There are cultural factors which experts might consider: mask wearing is seen as ‘normal’ in some countries but not others.  There are shortage factors: promoting mask use may make it more difficult for health professionals to obtain them.  There are psychological factors: wearing a mask may enhance the sense of security the wearer has, which in turn may improve a feeling of well-being, or conversely may encourage risk-taking.

Are the experts behind the Swedish strategy of limited social and economic restrictions, less expert than those behind the UK strategy or the Taiwanese one?  The differences of approach can’t simply be attributed to experts taking different national circumstances into account, although that may be part of the explanation. 

Some experts support closing schools, others not.  Experts in different countries have reached different conclusions about the number of intensive care beds that will be needed.  Countries which have adopted broadly similar lockdown regimes, as advised by experts, have produced very different infection and mortality outcomes.  There has been extensive modelling of the likely progression of the pandemic, but the numbers of those predicted to die vary widely.  And there are different expectations around when the pandemic will ‘peak’.  If experts are such experts, it is asked, why do they so often differ?  

There are good and less good reasons for such differences.  Differences may arise from being alert to local conditions, surely admirable.  Ignorance is another good reason.  There are many, many things which are not well understood about the COVID-19 pandemic.  These include the infection rate, the infection-fatality rate, the role and numbers of asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus, what level and duration of immunity those who have recovered from infection might have, whether the numbers dying are being fully captured (in old age homes for example), and so on.  

Strategies seem to have been heavily influenced by epidemiological modelling.  All modelling rests on deciding which data can be relied upon, which variables to include in the model, and on assumptions about the relationship between variables.  These models will improve as knowledge about these variables and their relationship increases. Is there, for example, and as some have suggested, a warm weather effect or an air quality effect?  And modellers must also make assumptions about what the efficacy of measures taken will be on infection and mortality rates. We can be confident that knowledge about such things will improve over time.  Public health experts have generally been frank, so far, in conveying where they are ignorant and uncertain.

In the USA, a recent survey of experts (conducted 13-14 April) resulted in an ‘expert consensus’ that the death toll in the USA would reach about 50,000 by 1^st May.  But this was not exactly a consensus.  More accurately, it was the most common answer given by the experts surveyed and the range of answers was striking given they were predicting a situation only 3 weeks away. High-end estimates reached as much as 200,000.  Low end estimates were around 20-30,000 deaths.  At the time of writing, 25^th April, deaths in the USA had already surpassed 50,000 and were rising around 2,000 per day, although even this probably excludes thousands of deaths not (yet) attributed to COVID.  50,000 deaths by 1^st May therefore looks likely to be an underestimate, although not wildly so.

A more complex reason for differences arises from the effects of pre-emptive action and lockdowns in one form or another.  Estimates need to be made as to the effect of, say, closing (or re-opening) cafes, on the spread of the pandemic.  Some countries, where housing conditions are cramped, may find it practically impossible to physically isolate whatever the lockdown regulations say.  Estimates of the actual compliance with regulations are also important.  These may differ markedly from place to place.  They will be significantly affected by levels of trust in the authorities, and the extent and effectiveness of state coercion. Other social circumstances will be critical, from traditions of compliance (or not), to practices of social greeting and gathering, to family structures (such as whether extended families live together and co-habit across generations).

In short, some of the expert differences may result from ignorance and things still unknown or unclear, and some from different local or national conditions.  Only some of these differences will be reduced in time through further study and peer review. 

Importantly, there will also be differences which arise from competing perspectives on what counts as important. There are legitimate grounds to reach different conclusions and prescribe different answers to the question: what is to be done? ‘Ensuring public health’ or ‘getting the economy moving again’ is one common public form that such competing perspectives take in the current crisis, and neither view is only about facts.  

An Australian example relates to shutting down schools.  The federal government and Chief Medical Officer argued, and still argue, that expert medical opinion held that schools were not a major vector of transmission. There was therefore no need to close schools.  But parents started withdrawing their children from schools unilaterally. Further, teachers’ unions complained that their members, some of whom were health vulnerable, were being exposed and were unable to effectively keep children physically distant from them and from each other, or ensure good handwashing practices.  State Premiers then stepped in, also claiming to have received expert advice, and shut the schools.  What expertise was drawn upon in deciding this? Clearly expert advice is as much dependent on its reception as on its veracity.  Premiers may have decided that to retain their own authority they needed to be receptive to public opinion.  Better to shut the schools in a fairly orderly way than to allow attendance to dissipate, may have been their thinking.  Perhaps the best science was that which also engaged with public opinion!

A South African example has important implications for the very decision to lockdown.  The lockdown order came into force in late March (27^th).  It was clearly communicated, decisive, very far-reaching and widely lauded by the population (or at least the elites).  It required all citizens to stay at home. It was enforced, often with violence, by the security forces.  In practice, the majority of the population live in crowded accommodation, often with limited access to soap and running water, making physical distancing extremely difficult. The capacity for the state to provide food is limited, there have been calls to simply hand out cash, and some steps, belatedly, to increase social transfers.  The result has been real hunger, looting of shops, and the beginnings of civil unrest.  As one commentator has noted ‘while the lockdown has been an inconvenience for the middle class, it has been a double whammy for millions of poor South Africans who have lost jobs and livelihoods and thus the ability to have food on the table’.  Not surprisingly, expert advice to the effect that a lockdown was needed, is being contested by others, equally but differently expert. Calls are growing ‘to manage all the risks associated with the epidemic, and not only the disease itself’ and avoid lockdown dependent strategies.  As leading thinker on science and technology, Harvard’s Professor Sheila Jasanoff, has noted: ‘We’ve modeled the progression of the disease, but not the social consequences of the preventative measures that we’re taking.’

Expert differences are not something to be scared of.  They are certainly not a reflection of ‘truth’ versus ‘error’.  Expert differences can even be welcomed.  They can both reveal the limits of ‘expert’ knowledge and the value of experts critically engaging with the publics and societies within which they are located.  Indeed, as the COVID-19 crisis affirms, Knowledge is never simply about unveiling the ‘true facts’.  It is also shaped by the Values of the expert (hence the common charge that elite values are different to those of ordinary folk), by the relations of Power that exist within society, and the Political objectives our rulers wish to pursue.  Expert knowledge exists within this messy confluence, not hovering above it.  Remember this next time you hear a politician tell you they are 'being guided by' or 'following' the science.

Part 1 of this series is available here and Part 2 here.