The social lives of COVID-19 data: following disease surveillance from institutions of power into everyday pandemic society

In the early stages of COVID-19, investments in digital infrastructures supported the rapid circulation of disease surveillance data throughout pandemic society. Scholarship on the social lives of COVID-19 data emphasizes their active role in informing the work of scientists, experts, and government officials in leading pandemic response, yet little research has examined how such data were used by lay people and non-experts for everyday decision-making outside of the institutions of power. This article draws on a multi-sited qualitative study to examine how three stratified communities in Southern California interpreted and used disease surveillance data during the first year of the pandemic. While some people relied on COVID-19 data to participate in practices of self-surveillance, others drew on data reporting to form more critical evaluations of the institutional response. In some cases, the numbers were openly contested for failing to account for measurement practices and the situated nature of life outside of the hospital and lab. This research demonstrates the heterogeneous ways people may relate to data once they move outside the networks that produce them. Data may circulate, travel, update, and inform, but publics in turn may respond, evaluate, critique, and refuse.