On epidemiological consciousness and COVID-191

“It Has Totally Changed How I Think About the Police”: COVID-19 and the Mis/Trust of Pandemic Policing in Aotearoa New Zealand

“…The majority also trusted NZP to do the same once NZ had moved to Alert Level 3. This corresponds with overseas studies (Dhkar et al, 2020;Reuben et al, 2020;Vasconcelos Bezerra et al, 2020) and our NZ-based study (Long et al, 2020), which confirm that public attitudes toward lockdown measures have been mostly positive. It is, therefore, not surprising that the enforcement of these measures is also welcomed by most members of the public.…”

“…Moreover, the following narrative exemplifies that NZP were not necessarily trusted to act as public health educators who would properly interpret or apply the lockdown regulations: This narrative highlights a particular challenge that NZP faced in establishing themselves as trustworthy public health educators and arbiters of lockdown rules during the COVID-19 pandemic-namely that this was a time marked by a "veritable discursive explosion when it comes to epidemiology" (Long et al, 2023, forthcoming) in which members of the public spent considerable amounts of time researching online what was permitted and what was disallowed, and engaging in independent assessments of epidemiological risk to determine whether any examples of "bending the rules" would lead to significant harm (Trnka et al 2021). Moreover, there were several points on which the rules were themselves unclear or subject to mixed messaging from government ministers (see, e.g., Long et al 2020). Police guidance on COVID-19 prevention measures was thus susceptible to contestation from members of the public who considered themselves (and perhaps were) better informed than the officers concerned.…”

“…While, overall, both contacts and non-contacts in our study trusted NZP to police and enforce the lockdown rules at Levels 4 and 3, our data also evinced a simmering awareness that NZP might not always be acting in a way that was fair, accurate, or in keeping with public health guidelines. Such perceptions-further fostered through both immediate encounters and pre-existing attitudes toward NZP-limit the efficacy of public policing as an optimal strategy for enforcing compliance with public health intervention regulations-especially in cases where NZP were called upon to exercise their discretion over how to respond to members of the public "bending" the rules to meet compelling personal or care needs (Long et al, 2020).…”

Who We Test For: Aligning Relational and Public Health Responsibilities in COVID-19 Testing in Scotland

“…Perceptions of students as problematically social – which reflected representations of students in the national media – exemplify how public health logics and diagrams had social lives (e.g. Lynteris 2017 ; Rhodes and Lancaster 2020 ), could be absorbed or “domesticated” (Engelmann and Montgomery 2020 ) and integrated into experimental forms of “epidemiological sociality” (Long et al 2023 :22). While many TestEd users were concerned about navigating the University as a high-risk space in terms of potential “close contacts,” their use of testing was incorporated into everyday strategies for pandemic living in more multiple ways that went beyond these epidemiological logics, as we go on to show.…”

“…Yet Matthew stressed that he tested not only to protect friends and colleagues, but “because you don’t know whether they are then going to see other relatives,” (his emphasis). 2 In considering how his actions would affect people’s future interactions, this mode of thinking reconfigured social relationships as chains of disease transmission, revealing the extent to which people’s ways of relating had become inflected by what others have termed an “epidemiological consciousness” (Long et al 2023 :21) or kinds of “epidemiological reasoning” (Engelmann 2021 :104). Equally importantly, Matthew was referring to the problem that his social, yet potentially viral, body posed to his friends’ capacity to protect their relatives – pointing to the primacy of duties toward kin in a pandemic.…”