S. Jones and Stefan Helmreich in Boston Review (figure from From Kristine Moore et al., “The Future of the COVID-19 Pandemic” (April 30, 2020). Used by Boston Review with permission from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, University of Minnesota):
On January 29, just under a month after the first instances of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, Chinese health officials published a clinical report about their first 425 cases, describing them as “the first wave of the epidemic.” On March 4 the French epidemiologist Antoine Flahault asked, “Has China just experienced a herald wave, to use terminology borrowed from those who study tsunamis, and is the big wave still to come?” The Asia Times warned shortly thereafter that “a second deadly wave of COVID-19 could crash over China like a tsunami.” A tsunami, however, struck elsewhere, with the epidemic surging in Iran, Italy, France, and then the United States. By the end of April, with the United States having passed one million cases, the wave forecasts had become bleaker. Prominent epidemiologists predicted three possible future “wave scenarios”—described by one Boston reporter as “seascapes,” characterized either by oscillating outbreaks, the arrival of a “monster wave,” or a persistent and rolling crisis.
While this language may be new to much of the public, the figure of the wave has long been employed to describe, analyze, and predict the behavior of epidemics. Understanding this history can help us better appreciate the conceptual inheritances of a scientific discipline suddenly at the center of public discussion. It can also help us judge the utility as well as limitations of those representations of epidemiological waves now in play in thinking about the science and policy of COVID-19. As the statistician Edward Tufte writes in his classic work The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983), “At their best, graphics are instruments for reasoning about quantitative information.” The wave, operating as a hybrid of the diagrammatic, mathematical, and pictorial, certainly does help to visualize and think about COVID-19 data, but it also does much more. The wave image has become an instrument for public health management and prediction—even prophecy—offering a synoptic, schematic view of the dynamics it describes.
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