Covid As Political Defeat: What Does It Mean For Public Health To Succeed?; The Ideological Assurances Of Data / Abby Cartus

Part one: What Does It Mean For Public Health To Succeed?

Epidemiologist and writer Abby Cartus joins me in this interview to explore a fascinating set of questions: What does it mean for public health to fail? What does it mean for it to succeed?

Within the context of the ongoing pandemic, we often hear, or ourselves may make, the refrain that "public health has failed us." This may be true, but it's quite a bit more than failure we must address. Public health is more, possibly less, but certainly different, than it purports and narrativizes itself to be. The rapid shifts in social relations with the onset of the pandemic almost five years ago, and with other looming, percolating crises gathering on the horizons, wondering about not only how public health could seemingly fail, but theoretically succeed, is a fundamentally generative discussion.

I think that what's happening at this moment in time is our society, kind of as a whole, is in the beginning stages of this messy process of attempting to make meaning out of this hugely traumatic event that has just ripped the fabric of most people's lives. I think that process is really messy and really chaotic. People are kind of all over the place. You're saying, faith in institutions of public health—I don't even know how I want to say this—faith that there is someone out there who knows or who cares, or who the buck stops with, I feel like that has really gone away. And that has been very, very jarring to a lot of people.

I remember like back in 2021—no, this was in 2020 because I was still a grad student, and I was still on Twitter. And I remember a local reporter here in Pittsburgh followed me on Twitter, and I was like, What the hell? And I went and looked at their page, and they had tweeted like, I don't know what to make of this COVID stuff. I'm so scared, I'm just finding people know what they're talking about, and I'm going to follow them. And I remember thinking, Oh, no, not me! I don't know! I don't know anything! I'm a student!

Abby Cartus writes about these subjects for her newsletter, Closed Form, and this interview is based on several of the essays she's produced for it. Due to time constraints, we ended up recording our entire discussion over the course of two days.

Part Two: The Ideological Assurances Of Data

Epidemiologist and writer Abby Cartus returns to continue our discussion about the so-called successes and failures of public health, particularly as it relates to the ongoing pandemic. 

In this interview, I asked Abby to clarify the kinds of data that are collected—mainly from wastewater sites—and how that data is modeled and presented at this phase of the pandemic. How does this impose limitations on our view of the current rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the US population? After establishing what can be understood, and not understood, from wastewater data, I asked Abby to raise her critique of how this data is being modeled and presented by the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative, a popular and well regarded resource often cited by covid cautious and public health advocacy individuals and groups, and what this indicates about not only where we are at this phase of the pandemic, but how data and statistics are underlaid by ideological assumptions that deserve examination.

I think it's a completely different articulation of the problem to say, I take all the precautions that I can because COVID is the worst pathogen ever, and it's out of control right now; there's a million plus infections a day; it's worse than it's ever been. That's one articulation of the problem. 

Another articulation of the problem is like, I have no choice because we don't know and because it's important to me—for whatever my reason is, it's important to me to protect myself against COVID—and because we don't know where it is, I'm fucking stuck; I have no choice but to take all this onto myself; I have no choice but to purchase these expensive masks; I have no choice but to be the only person masking everywhere I go; I have no choice but to build my own Corsi-Rosenthal box, and try to bring it to my workplace and hope that I don't get in trouble. I have no choice but to do all these things because the federal government has just decided that it's not important where COVID is—they have decided for us on a population level that it's not important if you are exposed to COVID, if you catch COVID, and all this stuff. 

And so, I think how we kind of articulate that does matter at the end of the day. The action is the same, you know what I mean? To protect yourself, you've got to do all these expensive, taxing, alienating things. Thinking about how we are trying to move with this stuff politically, I think it does matter what the articulation of the problem that people are facing really is.

Bio:

Abby Cartus is a statistician, epidemiologist, and writer based in Pittsburgh, PA.

Episode Notes:

Subscribe to Abby’s newsletter, Closed Form

The articles cited in this interview are: Covid as political defeat, Who's afraid of public health?, How to read the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative models (part 1), How to read the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative models (part 2), Still polishing a turd: Pandemic Mitigation Collective's technical appendix (part 1)

The music featured is by Nick Vander, used with permission by the artist.