The Curve

As SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 travels the planet, we’re sitting at home on the sofa doing our bit, participating in a biopolitical experiment of global proportions. Under the tutelage and watchful eye of population experts – epidemiologists, public health officials, etc. – we and millions more are invited, cajoled and sometimes compelled to act. Today’s most urgent task, we are told, is to ‘flatten the curve’. But what is this curve? On first inspection, it’s a simple plot of the number of new cases of COVID-19 occurring over time, an epidemiological rendering of the movement of SARS-CoV-2 through a population. There isn’t just one curve, of course, but many. Here in Toronto, we receive daily accounts of curves for our city, our province and our country. We’re invited to scrutinise our curves and compare them to those of other populations. We strive to avoid Italy’s fate. Can we reproduce South Korea’s relative success? Crucially, these curves are not simply accounts of the past, but also depictions of possible futures. Our trajectories have partly been set, we are told, but we can – indeed must – write our story’s ending. Through apposite collective actions, we can flatten the curve, bend it towards a future where our healthcare services are not overwhelmed, thus saving as many lives as possible. We are both subjects and objects of the curve. Operating the curve depends on numbers, yet we are simultaneously drowning in and parched for them. On the one hand, modellers generate unending numeric projections that include staggering mortality rates. These potential numbers are overwhelming. On the other, simple acts of counting have proven deeply problematic and we’re flying blind. We don’t yet know with any accuracy how many are or have been infected, where they are, who and where their contacts are, what the case and infection fatality rates are. Nor are our few existing metrics standardised, making comparison tricky. We must treat numbers – ours and others – with suspicion. Still, the only way to trace our curve, to hone our model projections, to defy our models’ worst predictions, and to escape our domestic incarceration, is to collect such numbers. And to share them. The only way to flatten the curve, it seems, is to show, know and act upon it collectively. For this, the power of numbers to illuminate and bind is vital. In time, anthropologists will have plenty to say about SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19. Even now, though, while working together on our curves, future directions beckon. One is to rediscover in biopolitics not just bare life and the politics of death, but the productive regulation of population; those instances, as Foucault famously put it, when power operates to ensure, sustain and multiply life. Then come numbers, counting, metrics, standardisation and quantification: all things anthropologists often love to hate. True, these things can seduce, reduce and deceive. But they can also foster life and enhance our ability to work on it. Taking numbers and their life-sustaining capacity seriously wouldn’t go amiss. Our lives may depend on it.

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