Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-skm99 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T21:02:02.264Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Epidemiological surveillance and performance assessment: the two roles of health indicators during the COVID-19 pandemic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2021

Nathan Genicot
Nathan Genicot*
Affiliation:
Perelman Centre for Legal Philosophy, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: nathan.genicot@ulb.be
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to the massive development and use of health indicators. Drawing on the history of international public health and of the management of infectious disease, this paper attempts to show that the normative power acquired by metrics during the pandemic can be understood in light of two rationales: epidemiological surveillance and performance assessment. On the one hand, indicators are established to evaluate and rank countries’ responses to the outbreak; on the other, the evolution of indicators has a direct influence on the content of public health policies. Although quantitative data are an absolute necessity for coping with such disasters, it is critical to bear in mind the inherent partiality and precarity of the information provided by health indicators. Given the growing importance of normative quantitative devices during the pandemic, and assuming that their influence is unlikely to decrease in the future, they call for close scrutiny.

Keywords

health datasurveillance indicatorsperformance indicatorsglobal healthCOVID-19
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 17 , Special Issue 2: Numbers in an emergency: The many roles of indicators in the COVID-19 crisis , June 2021 , pp. 186 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Berlivet, L (2001) Déchiffrer la maladie. In Dozon, J-P and Fassin, D (eds), Critique de la santé publique: Une approche anthropologique. Paris: Balland, p. 75.Google Scholar
Blouin, Genest G (2015) World Health Organization and disease surveillance: jeopardizing global public health? Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine 19, 595–614.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowker, GC and Star, SL (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Broome, A and Quirk, J (2015) Governing the world at a distance: the practice of global benchmarking. Review of International Studies 41, 819–841.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, TM, Cueto, M and Fee, E (2006) The World Health Organization and the transition from ‘international’ to ‘global’ health. American Journal of Public Health 96, 62–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cooley, A and Snyder, J (eds) (2015) Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, K et al. (eds) (2012a) Governance by Indicators: Global Power through Quantification and Rankings. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, KE, Kingsbury, B and Merry, SE (2012b) Indicators as a technology of global governance: indicators. Law & Society Review 46, 71–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Desrosières, A (2002) The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Desrosières, A (2015) Retroaction: how indicators feed back onto quantified actors. In Mugler, J et al. (eds), The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society), pp. 329–353.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donnelly, M (2005) William Farr and quantification in nineteenth-century English public health. In Jorland, G, Opinel, A and Weisz, G (eds), Body Counts: Medical Quantification in Historical and Sociological Perspectives. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, pp. 251–265.Google Scholar
Fallon, C, Thiry, A and Brunet, S (2020) Planification d'urgence et gestion de crise sanitaire: La Belgique face à la pandémie de Covid-19. Courrier hebdomadaire du CRISP 2453–2454, 5.Google Scholar
FAO et al. (2008) Contributing to One World, One Health: A Strategic Framework for Reducing Risks of Infectious Diseases at the Animal–Human–Ecosystems Interface. Available at https://www.oie.int/doc/ged/D5720.PDF (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
Figuié, M (2014) Towards a global governance of risks: international health organisations and the surveillance of emerging infectious diseases. Journal of Risk Research 17, 469–483.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fisher, A (2012) From diagnosing under-immunization to evaluating health care systems: immunization coverage indicators as a technology of global governance. In Davis, KE et al. (eds), Governance by Indicators. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 217–246.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frydman, B and Van Waeyenberge, A (eds) (2013) Gouverner par les standards et les indicateurs: de Hume aux rankings. Bruxelles: Bruylant.Google Scholar
Gaudillière, J-P (2014) De la santé publique internationale à la santé globale. L'OMS, la Banque mondiale et le gouvernement des thérapies chimiques. In Pestre D (ed.), Le gouvernement des technosciences. Paris: La Découverte, p. 65.Google Scholar
Gaudillière, J-P (2016) Un nouvel ordre sanitaire international ? Performance, néolibéralisme et outils du gouvernement médico-économique. Écologie & politique 52, 107–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Genicot, N (2020) Gérer la crise du Covid-19 par les données chiffrées, e-legal. Available at http://e-legal.ulb.be/special-covid19/dossier-special-covid19/gerer-la-crise-du-covid-19-par-les-donnees-chiffrees (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
Hacking, I (1982) Biopower and the avalanche of printed numbers. Humanities in Society 34, 279.Google Scholar
Hardy, A and Magnello, ME (2002) Statistical methods in epidemiology: Karl Pearson, Ronald Ross, Major Greenwood and Austin Bradford Hill, 1900–1945. Sozial- und Präventivmedizin, 47, 80.Google Scholar
IWG (2017) From Panic and Neglect to Investing in Health Security: Financing Pandemic Preparednessat a National Level. Available at https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/979591495652724770/from-panic-and-neglect-to-investing-in-health-security-financing-pandemic-preparedness-at-a-national-level (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
Keck, F (2020) Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Kelley, JG and Simmons, BA (eds) (2020) The Power of Global Performance Indicators. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, A (2017) Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency. Oakland: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Le Conseil fédéral suisse (2020) Ordonnance sur les mesures destinées à lutter contre l’épidémie de COVID-19 en situation particulière, 818.101.26. Available at https://www.admin.ch/opc/fr/classified-compilation/20201774/index.html (accessed 17 March 2021).Google Scholar
Lin, Y-T (2017) Making standards to quantify all health matters: the World Health Organization's Statistical Practices, 1946–1960. Monde(s) 11, 247–266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lothian, NV (1924) The service of epidemiological intelligence and public health statistics. American Journal of Public Health 14, 287–290.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mahajan, M (2019) The IHME in the shifting landscape of global health metrics. Global Policy 10, 110–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malito, DV, Umbach, G and Bhuta, N (eds) (2018) The Palgrave Handbook of Indicators in Global Governance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manzo, G (2020) Complex social networks are missing in the dominant COVID-19 epidemic models. Sociologica 14, 31–49.Google Scholar
Merry, SE, Davis, KE and Kingsbury, B (eds) (2015) The Quiet Power of Indicators: Measuring Governance, Corruption, and Rule of Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, M et al. (2016) Identifying Future Disease Hot Spots: Infectious Disease Vulnerability Index. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelken, D and Siems, M (eds) (2017) Global social indicators: constructing transnational legitimacy. International Journal of Law in Context 13, 434–526.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
OIE (2007) A brief history of the OIE. Bulletin 1, 6.Google Scholar
OIE (2019) Tool for the Evaluation of Performance of Veterinary Service, 7th edn. Paris: World Organisation for Animal Health.Google Scholar
Oppenheim, B et al. (2019) Assessing global preparedness for the next pandemic: development and application of an epidemic preparedness index. BMJ Global Health 4, e001157.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paillette, C (2012) Épidémies, santé et ordre mondial: Le rôle des organisations sanitaires internationales, 1903–1923. Monde(s) 2, 235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Porter, TM (2005) Medical quantification: science, regulation and the state. In Jorland, G, Opinel, A and Weisz, G (eds), Body Counts: Medical Quantification in Historical and Sociological Perspectives. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, pp. 394–402.Google Scholar
Rasmussen, A (2015) La grippe: un problème pour l'action sanitaire internationale, 1889–1930. In Boudia, S and Henry, E (eds), La mondialisation des risques: Une histoire politique et transnationale des risques sanitaires et environnementaux. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, p. 27.Google Scholar
Restrepo Amariles, D (2014) The rise of transnational legal indicators: empirical accounts of law in a global society. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université Libre de Bruxelles.Google Scholar
Restrepo Amariles, D (ed.) (2015) Legal indicators, global law and legal pluralism. Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 47, 1–139.Google Scholar
Restrepo, Amariles D (2017) Supping with the Devil? Indicators and the rise of managerial rationality in law. International Journal of Law in Context 13, 465–484.Google Scholar
Reubi, D (2018) Epidemiological accountability: philanthropists, global health and the audit of saving lives. Economy and Society 47, 83–110.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roberts, SL and Elbe, S (2017) Catching the flu: syndromic surveillance, algorithmic governmentality and global health security. Security Dialogue 48, 46–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruger, JP (2005) The changing role of the World Bank in global health. American Journal of Public Health 95, 60–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Saltelli, A et al. (2020) Five ways to ensure that models serve society: a manifesto. Nature 582, 482–484.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stark, D (2020) Testing and being tested in pandemic times. Sociologica 14, 67.Google Scholar
Supiot, A (2017) Governance by Numbers: The Making of a Legal Model of Allegiance, Brown, S (trans.). Oxford: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Sydenstricker, E (1924) The outlook for international vital statistics. American Journal of Public Health 14, 832–838.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tufekci, Z (2020) This overlooked variable is the key to the pandemic. The Atlantic. Available at https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/ (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
Weir, L and Mykhalovskiy, E (2007) The geopolitics of global public health surveillance in the twenty-first century. In Bashford, A (ed.), Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 240–263.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
WHO (1968) The Second Ten Years of the WHO. 1958–1967. Geneva: WHO. Available at https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/44644/9789241564298_eng.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
WHO (2008) The Third Ten Years of the WHO. 1968–1977. Geneva: WHO. Available at www.who.int/global_health_histories/who-3rd10years.pdf (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
WHO (2016) International Health Regulations (2005), 3rd edn. Geneva: WHO.Google Scholar
WHO (2018a) International Health Regulations (2005) State Party Self-assessment Annual Reporting Tool. Geneva: World Health Organization. Available at https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/272432/WHO-WHE-CPI-2018.16-eng.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
WHO (2018b) Joint External Evaluation, 2nd edn. Geneva: World Health Organization. Available at https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/259961/9789241550222-eng.pdf;jsessionid=B2233CD99346BDD11F1EA30E7BF6F090?sequence=1 (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
WHO (2018c) Monitoring and Evaluation Framework. Geneva: World Health Organization. Available at https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/276651/WHO-WHE-CPI-2018.51-eng.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
WHO (2019) Benchmarks for International Health Regulations (IHR) Capacities. Geneva: World Health Organization. Available at https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/311158/9789241515429-eng.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
WHO (2020a) COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response (SPRP) Monitoring and Evaluation Framework. Geneva. Available at https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-ncov-me-framework-web.pdf?sfvrsn=656e430f_1 (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
WHO (2020b) Guidance for Conducting a Country COVID-19 Intra-action Review (IAR). Geneva. Available at https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-2019-nCoV-Country_IAR-2020.1 (accessed 1 February 2021).Google Scholar
Youde, J (2011) Mediating risk through the international health regulations and bio-political surveillance. Political Studies 59, 813–830.CrossRefGoogle Scholar