This is a 1798 mapping of yellow fever in NYC. One thing to notice about the Covid pandemic is the way much…

This is a 1798 mapping of yellow fever in NYC. One thing to notice about the Covid pandemic is the way much of the rich visualisation public health has used for centuries to analyse outbreaks has been stripped back to the barest data - cases, hospitalisations and deaths. /1 https://t.co/jRXuqGfxY2

Those are often translated into line, column or other charts. But overwhelmingly this pandemic is understood in terms of case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths, with vaccination data added once vaccines were developed. No doubt a lot more analysis is done…/2

…inside public health units, that the public never sees, using other data and visualisations. But that’s the point - we’re not seeing it, and politicians are making sure we hear very little of what is concluded from those analyses. An exception was LGA mapping…/3

…at the time of greater use of geographical restrictions. Those mappings are still available, though few bother with them. But we got a taste of some of the ways outbreaks have been historically interrogated prior to Covid, during LGA restrictions and the debates over…/4 https://t.co/r2aNNvovv3

…spread in rich vs poor areas etc. That’s the bread and butter of real outbreak control, the interrogation and mapping of multiple possible causative factors. Tom Koch captures this well in his wonderful book. /5 https://t.co/gozN7iJWPL

In a way, and this isn’t accidental, it reflects other political things. Society, in its rich diversity and complex contexts, with its hierarchies of equity, disappears when you reframe it as a libertarian aggregate of individuals. What I call N=1 thinking. /6

All cases, hospitalisations, vaccinations and deaths become absolutely equivalent data points. All geography, class, income, disadvantage etc. disappears from view. The historical mappings, which as Koch explains have never been illustrations of reality but rather analytical…/7

…investigations, the testing of hypotheses, have mostly disappeared from public view. Unsurprisingly, when the dominant political belief system is that society, or the public, doesn’t even exist. That’s what libertarianism is, that belief. It’s not hidden. /end https://t.co/YRqVBUJhiO