Mysterious data politics

>> In the social sciences, the inadequate Corona data policy of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) and the focus on the daily or cumulative number of confirmed Covid-19 cases were criticized, albeit only sporadically, in spring 2020. One of the leading statisticians in sociology in Germany, Rainer Schnell - together with Menno Smid from the Infas Institute for Applied Social Science - presented with unsparing clarity as part of the digital colloquium "Sociological Perspectives of the Corona Crisis" at the Berlin Science Center for Social Research on April 15, 2020: that it is incomprehensible why the RKI would limit itself to absolute reporting incidences of those who tested positive without taking influencing factors such as test reasons and test frequencies into account. The RKI also foregoes representative surveys of infection events and instead relies on unreliable survey instruments. Professional pandemic management is simply not possible without a solid database. These early warning recommendations went unheard instead of shedding light on the darkness of the official data desert on the actual infection rate and individual infection risks.
In emphatic words, Schnell and Smid suggested, firstly, representative preparatory studies stratified according to federal state and town size.
to carry out valence samples (n = 30,000).
ren, to identify the proportion of infected people in the population, secondly, panel studies (n = 5,000) to record the actual course of the disease and symptom-free courses of people who tested positive, thirdly, post-mortem samples (covid secondary or main diagnosis, popular “in connection” or “with” vs. “on”) and fourthly, random samples among the general population (n = 3,000), including older people and disadvantaged people, in order to empirically examine social effects of the pandemic measures.
Medical statistician Gerd Antes noted that even the question of whether bus drivers or hairdressers were exposed could have been examined simply and easily. You would only have had to ask about your current professional position for rapid antigen or PCR tests. None of this happened in Germany during the pandemic years. Even in the second year of the pandemic, nothing fundamental changed in the completely inadequate data situation and data policy of the RKI, especially in a European comparison. While from May 2020 onwards, for example, the Office of National Statistics in Great Britain and later also Corona Immunitas in Switzerland carried out regular seroprevalence studies, the responsible decision-makers and authorities in Germany saw no need for this in the second year of the pandemic. Instead, excessive fear rhetoric has been used in public communication for too long in order to convey to the population the seriousness of the situation. The bottom line is that the political decision-makers and their teams of experts believe that they can control complex social systems by reporting incidents and that far-reaching top-down interventions are an effective strategy for “getting the virus under control.” .
It is a sociological puzzle and at the same time an open research question why the relevant state institutions in Germany ignored the relevant methods of social science statistics, did not produce any valid, representative data on the pandemic and did not carry out evidence-based monitoring of measures. Instead, for too long people relied on speculative mathematical-physical computer modeling. The gloomy forecasts about the further course of the pandemic were also culturally underpinned by the collective fear that we were dealing with a universal, indiscriminate health threat to the entire population (“killer virus”) that could quickly become exponential.
Under the selective radar of modeling positivism, much of what constitutes a pandemic in a society remained unobserved in 2020 and 2021, first and foremost the importance of social settings, structures and institutions as well as "local" cultural practices for the infection process, and above all the undesirable consequences of a restrictive, paternalistic policy of measures. In retrospect, it seems almost bizarre that the pandemic was communicated as a “socially structureless” biomedical natural event, with a clear distribution of roles: society as a “herd”, politics as a “shepherd” and the citizen as a “sheep”. to take up a pointed formulation by Wolfgang Streeck from the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” from January 2021.
In view of a puzzling data policy and an almost erratic ad hoc pandemic management, the question of the vulnerability or resilience of democratic institutions in times of extraordinary crises is urgent. It is all the more urgent to review the last three years in a methodically controlled manner in an unbiased and open-ended manner, taking into account broad technical and interdisciplinary skills. In the last three years we have learned directly that a pandemic is not an isolated virological-medical event, but rather a complex bio-social event. An interdisciplinary assessment of pandemic management would be necessary simply to be able to systematically take a look at the unintended consequences of the policy measures that have been overlooked for too long. Nothing less than the question of the institutional ability of the state, politics and society to learn is under scrutiny. <<