The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has a concept called hysteresis. Basically it means living in the past. An example, is the boss of a factory who doesn’t want to install additional washrooms because… well, it’s just too much trouble. Having to hire an architect, and get a building permit, and all the disruption. Hell, its easier to just buy some bottles of hand sanitizer. Hysteresis means living in a pre-Pandemic world. And this attitude is all around us. Because there is some new evidence that better toilet facilities reduce the spread of Covid-19.
But Bourdieu also has some ideas that might help in this Pandemic. Bourdieu was always opposed to network analysis because he said it does not capture the social foundations of everyday life. Contact tracing apps are a kind of network analysis. They seems to imagine individuals floating above the world. An analysis of their contacts (their networks) is all that we need.
But Public Health research has demonstrated again and again that people have social lives, and live in built environments, and have jobs. It is significant that in Ontario there are no statistics kept about the occupations of people who contact Covid-19, and those who die from it. We are aware of healthcare workers, to some extent about workers in Amazon warehouses (though we don’t want to think about that when we order stuff — hysteresis again) and meat processing plants. These are not just networks: they are work environments that involve occupational safety.
If you look at John Snow’s famous map of cholera cases in Soho, it is quite possible that many of these people shared the same space (and today would turn up on a mobile phone contact-tracing app) but this network was not what caused the disease. What these people had in common is that they got their drinking water from the same contaminated pump. It took intelligence and a sociological imagination to discover this crucial fact.
In a similar way, it takes ordinary statistical work to discover that in England and Wales deaths from Covid-19 are twice as high in poor areas than in wealthier neighbourhoods. Researchers find similar patterns in New York.
Of the 20,283 Covid-19 registered deaths in England and Wales to 17 April, an overwhelming proportion were of people from the poorest areas.
Caelainn Barr, Covid-19 deaths twice as high in poorest areas in England and Wales, The Guardian, May 1, 2020.
The substantial variation in the rates for COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths across the New York City boroughs is concerning. The Bronx, which has the highest proportion of racial/ethnic minorities, the most persons living in poverty, and the lowest levels of educational attainment had higher rates of hospitalization and death related to COVID-19 than the other 4 boroughs. In contrast, the rates for hospitalizations and deaths were lowest among residents of the most affluent borough…
Wadhera and Smith, Variation in COVID-19 Hospitalizations and Deaths Across New York City Boroughs, Research Letter, JAMA, April 20,2020.
And this is not something that network analysis can capture. Network analysis just looks at who talks to who. It doesn’t capture the realities of how people live, social inequalities, and the long-understood relationship between social class and health outcomes. The Apple / Google App doesn’t capture that because it’s model of people is that of a computer engineer, examining nodes in networks. But that is not how we live our lives. We live in a class structure and a human geography. To understand this we need to think forward, not backward.
Trent Research Group on the Pandemic 