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.

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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.

Science, expertise and trust in COVID times - Part 2 - why trust experts now?

There have been many well-publicised examples, in recent years, of politicians expressing mistrust in experts.  ‘People in this country have had enough of experts’ was the view of leading UK politician Michael Gove in 2016, although he later clarified he mainly had economists in mind. US President Donald Trump has called global warming ‘bullshit’ and a ‘Chinese hoax’. In Australia we have seen some parliamentarians assert that vaccination causes autism, or that climate change is a fabrication, despite strong evidence to the contrary. We have seen a special commissioner appointed in Australia to investigate ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’ despite no expert believing such a syndrome exists.  Not all suspicion of expert knowledge was unfounded. Leading economists, blinded by economic orthodoxy, had not seen the 2008 financial meltdown coming, although there were some honorable exceptions.

In this crisis, faced with something new, dramatic and dangerous, most political leaders turned to the experts - infectious disease and public health experts, virologists and epidemiologists especially.  Not surprisingly, and with some notable exceptions, they wanted to know how serious COVID-19 was, what devastation it might wreak, and what they should do.  

It is now common to hear politicians of various political stripes talk of how their actions will be ‘guided by the science’, by the health experts and epidemiologists in particular (see for example the UK but not Brazil‘s Bolsonaro).  In the USA, those of a ‘liberal’ disposition (in the US sense of the word) have been re-assured by the presence of Dr. Anthony Fauci.  He has been seen to be a well-informed and calm voice of reason amidst the daily briefings, rantings, and policy flip-flops of a dysfunctional White House and its blame-others boss.  

It is important to acknowledge quite how unusual this is.  Despite common talk of evidence-based policymaking being the gold standard, it is more common to find evidence being recruited to support a desired policy.  We should expect to see this approach returning as the pandemic progresses. Further, strong evidence has not always resulted in strong policy and action.  Climate change is the most obvious, but not the only, example.  Expert opinion is that dramatically cutting fossil fuel use is needed to avoid catastrophic climate change, but actions by government to address climate change have been largely underwhelming and indeed such ‘expert’ opinion has often been rejected outright.  Expert opinion is that hunger is the lot of 842 million people worldwide. Nine million people in the world die of hunger each year, more than the combined death toll for malaria, AIDs and tuberculosis - but action in response is modest. According to experts, air pollution kills millions annually, mainly poor people.  Many have noted the improvement in air quality as one positive side-effect of the COVID-19 lockdowns.  In short, evidence does not normally result in action. 

This crisis has seen an unusually prominent role played by Chief Medical Officers, Chief Scientists and other leading public health experts. Acknowledging the need for expert perspectives was not always there from the start … witness the persecution of Chinese doctors in Wuhan who first flagged the problem, or Trump’s reluctance, even in late March, to acknowledge that anything needed to be done to combat what was only ‘flu’.  But once the crisis was recognised the general trend was to turn to public health experts, virologists and epidemiologists for advice. 

Why this renewed use of experts?  I can think of four basic reasons. 

Firstly, the political class genuinely didn’t know what to do in the face of this unprecedented event, COVID-19.  They could not draw upon their stock solutions (trade good, taxes bad, ‘it’s the economy stupid’, and so on).  Their initial attempts were usually confused and slow.  Having neither knowledge nor experience themselves, they looked around for those who might have. This knowledge was often unavailable in-house following years of degrading the capabilities of the public service.

Secondly, for many, but not all, citizens, being seen to take expert medical advice would enhance trust in the political leaders.  Politicians could benefit from being seen to be taking advice. A lack of trust in the political class, its motives and competence, has been widely observed in recent years.  Not surprisingly, therefore, there was good reason for the political class to draw on existing public health expertise.  Bolsanaro’s open rejection of such advice, and his dismissal of his Health Minister, is hurting him politically.

Thirdly, rich and middle-class people are affected.  Unlike hunger, COVID-19 is said not to discriminate.  But, like hunger, it hits the poorest… witness the profiles of those dying from the virus in the USA, or the shockingly unjust treatment of rural migrant workers in India.  Whilst the very wealthiest can ensure more comfortable lockdown conditions and better medical treatment if required, they can’t avoid being infected.  When it is said ‘this disease does not discriminate’ this means the rich are getting it too and so the political class must act.

Finally, one can also anticipate some political leaders using experts as the ‘fall guy’ if management of the pandemic does not go according to plan or too many undesirable effects occur.  We already see this in Trump’s attacks on the World Health Organisation (WHO) and his re-tweeting of attacks on Fauci.  The most high-profile expert advisors, those appearing on TV regularly alongside their political bosses, would be well-advised to project independence of mind now, both in words and body language, if they want to survive.  

An official reckoning with how the pandemic was managed will surely come.  Expect it to reveal the hollowness of the claim that policy was ‘guided by the best available science and evidence’.  What science and what evidence?  Scientific views differ, different disciplines produce different insights, and evidence can be contradictory.  Perhaps it will also expose the limits of ‘follow the science’ thinking itself, the perils of scientism more generally, and the need to understand that science and technology is a social institution needing social inquiry.

Leading scientists are themselves worrying about being sucked into a vortex.  'As a scientist', Prof Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, is reported as saying, 'I hope I never again hear the phrase "based on the best science and evidence" spoken by a politician. This phrase has become basically meaningless and used to explain anything and everything.”  According to Prof Mark Woolhouse, an infectious diseases epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, modelling has had a disproportionate influence: 'scientific advice is driven far too much by epidemiology - and I’m an epidemiologist'.

Trust in experts and faith in science should not be a given.  Trust needs to be earned.

In the next instalment I will focus on ‘why experts differ?’

Part 1 of this series is available here

Is the lockdown in Melbourne evaporating?

Is it just my imagination or is the lockdown in Melbourne evaporating even before it has been officially lifted?

There's a notable increase of people on the streets and a number of small shops are re-opening.  The local Coles supermarket is getting visibly busier.  And there are many more cars on the road than a week ago.  Some homeless people are back on the streets begging.  Parks are much fuller than they were two weeks ago.

I needed a haircut after making a total mess of cutting my own hair, and found a salon around the corner that had re-opened!  There is no law against them doing so but a few weeks back every hairdresser shut their doors.  This one was using the JobKeeper subsidy to keep their Australian staff at home and on the payroll, but getting the non-Australian staff, ineligible for assistance, to do the work.

Certainly, in all these instances, people were making some effort not to congregate and some distancing measures are in place going into shops, although in practice 1.5 meter gaps are really not practicable - the supermarket aisles aren't that wide and so people inevitably pass more closely than is recommended.

What are the implications of de facto lifting the lockdown before government advises it?  Does it undermine state authority?  Or is the state government turning a blind eye because the current infection rate and death rate is pretty low?

The state of Victoria has a population of 6.28 million, two-thirds of whom live in Melbourne.  According to the state government, as of 24 April 2020, the total number of coronavirus cases in Victoria was 1,343, including 6 new cases yesterday.  These are mainly people who have returned from abroad.  27 people are in hospital, including 11 people in intensive care. 16 people have died.

Science, expertise and trust in COVID times - Part 1

Are ‘experts’ and scientists fashionable and trusted again?  The high profile role of medical experts and chief medical officers on daily TV, suggests that they are.  ‘It has already forced people back to accepting that expertise matters’ is the view of Professor Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise.  On this reading, COVID-19 may herald a welcome reversal of the ‘post-truth’ turn and an acceptance that facts matter and expertise counts.  

There are, however, many reasons not to embrace such re-assertions of expert authority uncritically.  Many challenging questions about science and this crisis, and expertise more generally, will start (re-)emerging.  They already are.  Whilst experts may indeed have specialised insight into particular issues, they are not simply bearers of ‘truth’ or there to unveil facts which have hitherto been hidden.  And when politicians say they will be ‘guided by the science’ we should be as alert to deception as when they told us ‘people have had enough of experts’.

Much depends on how the science is conducted, for whom, and the ends to which it is mobilised.  In a democratic society, experts must be open to challenging questions beyond those envisaged by peer review: how do they know what they know? what knowledge and wisdom have they included and what have they omitted? what assumptions and values infuse their research? what are the social costs and benefits of their research? what conflicts of interest might exist? and so on…. If we want experts to be taken seriously and expertise to be recognised, then rather than proclaiming the need to trust scientists and have faith in the authority of experts, we should acknowledge that the rightful place of science is within, not above, society. 

In an analytical piece, ‘Never Waste a Crisis’, written in mid-March, my co-author and I suggested that faith in experts will increase short-term but decrease longer-term.  We didn’t elaborate at that time.  Here I try to do so.

First, some preliminary observations.

A pandemic was not unexpected.  Observers of global trends have long been aware of the risk of a major global pandemic, that it was a question of when not whether.  Historians of infectious disease have known of the devastating impacts these have had in the past.  Infectious disease specialists, virologists and epidemiologists have long flagged up the need to prepare for such an eventuality.  Specialist facilities exist in many countries charged with tracking, planning for, and responding to potential outbreaks – the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the USA being only one example.  The World Health Organisation (WHO) has significant responsibilities too.

Many governments and public health specialists conduct regular exercises to test their preparedness for such events. Examples include Exercise Cygnus in the UK in 2016, and a major global pandemic preparedness exercise, Event 201, held in the USA and organised by Johns Hopkins University, the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum (WEF) in October 2019.  In both these exercises it became clear that governments and health authorities were not well prepared.  The Gates Foundation has many shortcomings, as does philanthro-capitalism generally, but warning of pandemic risk over many years is not one of them.

Although pandemic risk was widely known, it was low on the priority list of many political leaders and thus received little, if any, attention: although there is some evidence that the leadership of countries in East Asia and parts of Africa, with recent experience of SARS, MERS and Ebola may have been more attentive.  

Global business leaders were aware of the risk but generally regarded it as low priority, perhaps not surprising given that their horizons are typically short-term and self-interested. The latest WEF-sponsored Global Risks Report, released in mid-January 2020 ahead of the annual Davos elite-fest, and with coronavirus already spreading, hardly mentions pandemics.  It was not on the Report’s list of ten ‘most likely’ global risks and was rated 10^th on the list in terms of impact should it occur.  This expert assessment now looks ridiculous.

Whilst in a general sense a pandemic was not unexpected, it is also true that this particular pandemic, COVID-19, was not expected. There was also, perhaps, complacency that any new pandemic might be contained, like SARS and MERS had been.  Some have called COVID-19 a ‘black swan’ event, an event with major effects but which comes as a surprise (and also an odd term in Australia where black swans, the birds, are not uncommon).  COVID-19 is a novel coronavirus in the sense that it is new and previously unknown in humans.  We are still in the early stages of understanding its progression, infectiousness and characteristics, and how to manage it absent a vaccine … although scientists and intensive care medicos on the frontline are learning fast.  In this context it is important to acknowledge ignorance.  There are many things about COVID-19 which experts do not know, at least not yet.

We are therefore in a paradoxical situation.  Experts have warned of pandemic risk for many years and governments mainly chose to remain ignorant, or at least failed to invest in preventative strategies and public health. Now with governments struggling to catch-up and learn about pandemic management, the experts find themselves, not surprisingly, deeply ignorant of this particular virus, and rushing to catch-up.

In the next instalments I’m going to reflect on four questions in relation to COVID-19:

1.     Why trust experts now?

2.     Why do experts differ, and does it matter?

3.     Which experts should we be relying upon in this crisis, and what facts matter?

4.     What to do about obvious misinformation?