Answer:
The COVID-19 pandemic was announced on 11 March 2020 by the World Health Organization, marking a turning point for the public health systems serving the health of constituent populations across the globe. This declaration moment is important for narrative on COVID-19 because it is the point at which it is accepted that the virus is not only travelling to different countries, but is now circulating in those countries. Governments are now required to take action to moderate the impact of the infection, reducing harm for the polity until the virus – through the mutation of its biological properties, human immunity, vaccines or some combination of these – takes its place, we hope, among the many other microbes with which human life has found co-existence.
The WHO declaration is also an important moment for the COVID-19 story because it reveals how data about notifications of diagnosed infection and deaths are used to make decisions and therefore reveals how, in the circumstances of a pandemic, it is keenly apparent that numerical and narrative futures constitute each other.
COVID-19 resembles these other outbreaks and pandemics, but the news stories about it seem to have a distinctively numerical quality. The number of known infections in a particular place over a period of time gives an index of the transmissibility of an infection. Mortality rates – a measure of the proportion of people that die with an infection – are also woven into pandemic stories, in general. But COVID-19’s numbers seem to be its story. News feeds continually update the counts of diagnoses and deaths, and have numerically tracked the contagion from a supposed source in China to other countries, notably South Korea, Iran and Italy, and then to most other parts of the world. This pandemic by numbers approach charts the particular transmissibility and severity of this virus, but also lends itself to our increasingly complex small-screen media diet, where numbers and graphs alongside images and videos more easily convey the COVID-19 story than do long form narrative texts.
