Chapter 3
Counting the dead during a pandemic
Introduction
The categorization of a COVID-19 death as an anomaly in media outlets and government briefings in 2020, well before COVID-19 became endemic, depicted the virus as an incongruous disruption in the habitual economy of life and death. COVID-19 deaths were represented as pathological, and differed from other causes of death during the pandemic, particularly through their quotidian announcement in official state-based tolls. Yet the implementation of vaccination regimes in 2021 sought to normalize COVID-19 deaths as an acceptable, if not inevitable, outcome of life for specific segments of a population. To this extent, to die of COVID-19 became comparable to those ‘routine’ deaths caused by the influenza virus each year. What is more, though, even ‘excess mortality’ was normalized in 2022, particularly by the World Health Organization, which estimated at that point that approximately 15 million people had died during the global pandemic. The international organization included in their global toll for the first time those ‘killed directly or indirectly’ by the pandemic, such as deaths caused by barriers to screening, diagnosing and treating other medical conditions, the overwhelming of health services or individuals avoiding or failing to receive health care (Davis 2022). COVID-19 deaths, then, like deaths caused by other communicable diseases, appeared in 2022 ‘no longer something that suddenly swooped down on life – as in an epidemic. Death was now something permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it’ (Foucault 2003 b, 244).
This chapter examines how technologies for counting the dead during a pandemic economize relations between life and death. It builds upon my previous writings on COVID-19, which analysed how the technology of death registration during the pandemic ‘depended on the creation of a new universal nomenclature for ascertaining causation, which excluded various circumstances of a person’s life in order to stabilize SARS-CoV-2 as a normative category for classification’ (Trabsky 2022a, 544).1 I argued that the classification of a COVID-19 death was inextricable from making an evaluative judgement about what is a ‘normal’ mortality rate for any given population. The focal point of this chapter is different insofar as I explore how technologies for counting the dead during a pandemic are conditioned upon a multiplicity of cost–benefit calculations. While bureaucratic accounting practices are routinely harnessed by governments in the management of fluctuations in mortality trends, during a pandemic these institutional practices often demonstrate the extent to which the statistical laws of mortality are subject to economic rationality.
This chapter aims to account for how the economization of death pervades the statistical laws of mortality, but also what the effects of economic rationality are for understanding how governments count the dead in the twenty-first century. It examines enumeration technologies from the perspective of law and the humanities, and draws from literature on both governmentality, particularly the writings of Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking, and the field of political economy, through the work of Wendy Brown. It contends that administrative procedures for recording an individual death, classifying its cause, enumerating it in a table and calculating probabilities of the risk of dying from a virus are interwoven with discourses of economic rationality. The chapter suggests that only by approaching the statistical laws of mortality from a humanities perspective is it possible to witness how practices of counting the dead economize relations between life and death.
The statistical laws of mortality
Michel Foucault’s account of the governance of plagues in the early modern period provides a cautionary tale of how power can be exercised in the time of a pandemic. The ‘great confinement’ of everyday life, which was designed to eradicate the plague from the town, involved closing borders, spatial partitioning, isolating infected houses, enforcing stay-at-home orders, and instituting a hierarchy of intendants, syndics and guards who kept watch over all movements inside and outside the town. In contrast to the banishment of lepers in the Middle Ages, the quarantining of the sick, the fumigation of infested premises and the confiscation of the dead after nightfall established a positive model for exercising power during a plague. Communications between different households were not simply forbidden, they were vigorously surveyed when a family member left their house once a week to purchase essential goods. Techniques of observation relied upon acts of permanent registration and depended on practices for recording the ‘visual examinations’ of intendants, syndics and guards, particularly insofar as they could enumerate the recent dead in bills of mortality. The plague was a ‘marvellous moment’ of disciplinary power, Foucault writes in Abnormal; it was ‘the political dream of an exhaustive, unobstructed power that is completely transparent to its object and exercised to the full’ (Foucault 200 3a, 47).
The continuities between the governance of plagues in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and the administrative management of a global pandemic in the twenty-first century are uncanny. COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11 March 2020. The public health response to COVID-19 initially involved extensive interventions into everyday life, such as curfews, lockdowns, border closures, quarantine orders, mandatory testing and other social distancing restrictions, which, akin to the legislative measures instituted in plague towns, maximized the vitality of populations while also allowing people to die (Trabsky 2022a, 543). The economization of hospital resources was nothing new for medical institutions in the twenty-first century, but revealed the extent to which governments calculate the economic costs of ‘foster[ing] life or disallow[ing] it to the point of death’ (Foucault 1998, 138). The COVID-19 pandemic confirmed, much like the epidemics that preceded it, that because ‘death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it’, as Foucault emphasizes, ‘the procedures of power have not ceased to turn away from death’ (Foucault 199 8, 138).
Yet this model of the plague is not the endpoint of the tale that Foucault narrates of how power can be exercised in the time of a pandemic. In Security, Territory, Population, a lecture series at the Collège de France that followed Abnormal by a couple of years, Foucault extrapolates from his description of the management of plagues, singling out the smallpox epidemics that ravaged much of the world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The notable difference with smallpox was the widespread distribution of a vaccine by the end of the nineteenth century and the eradication of the disease in the mid-twentieth century. Foucault describes the emergence of vaccination regimes as transformative in how communicable diseases could be managed by governments. Vaccination became an apparatus of securitization of the population – indeed, a population, as opposed to a city or town, became a target of administrative intervention – but one that was conceptualized according to a ‘calculus of probabilities’ (Foucault 20 04, 59).
This is not to say that the disciplinary powers developed in the governance of plague towns in the early modern period did not disappear with public health responses to the epidemics and pandemics that inundated the world in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. However, what appeared in the administration of regimes of vaccination, initially developed to combat the scourge of smallpox (la petite vérole) in the late eighteenth century, was the concept of a population that could be studied as a scientific object. In this arrangement of governmentality, a population was made sense of through the development of secular death registration procedures, classification systems for death causation, statistical tabulations of mortality rates and calculations of probabilities of life expectancy. Not only did these technologies delineate in law a boundary point between life and death, but they were also vital for how public health reformers determined what causes of death should be monitored at different levels of the population. They cohered in creating the idea, first cemented in the eighteenth century but enduring to this very day, that every population has a ‘normal’ rate of death.
The history of the secularization of death registration demonstrates a statistical regularity to mortality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is no coincidence that mortality statistics gained popularity at the same time that death became an object of registration. Statistics first emerged as a technology for organizing knowledge of the state in the seventeenth century, but by the nineteenth century governments were drowning in an inundation of numbers – the enumeration of illness, households, welfare, taxes, suicides and crime – that revealed a regularity to life and death. Ian Hacking writes of statistics as the ‘taming of chance’ (1990), a set of laws, rules or norms for governing probabilities of phenomena. He presents mortality statistics as a definitive example of the erosion of determinism and the organization of chance according to classification systems. John Graunt, who published Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a Following Index, and made upon the Bills of Mortality in 1662, pioneered the art of statistical analysis. He collated weekly counts of the dead in London and categorized them according to cause, age and sex in order to identify mortality trends. He was the first to ‘show that death is not governed by random strokes of fate but rather by stable and quantifiable patterns’ (Bayatrizi 2009, 612). However much Graunt insisted that his analyses were objective descriptions of the reality of death, the substitution of a quantifiable fact for the caprices of fate exposes the extent to which he actively constructed this reality. Early statistical laws of mortality were rudimentary, but they classified death causation according to a set of agreed probabilities that could be enumerated in a table. Despite the difficulties of ascertaining every cause of death, for Graunt and others in the seventeenth century, ‘to die of anything except causes on the official list … [was] illegal, for example, to die of old age’ (Hacking 199 1, 183).
While Graunt pursued statistical analysis as a pastime, and his writings were routinely ignored by sovereigns, by the late nineteenth century mortality statistics became indispensable tools for determining the wealth, health and strength of populations. Not only were they fastidiously collated through death registration systems, but legions of statisticians were employed by governments to make sense of the oscillating rhythms of life and death. The diverse range of ‘official lists’ that circulated throughout the West in the seventeenth century were superseded in the nineteenth century by a universal nomenclature, authored by Jacques Bertillon and appropriately titled the Bertillon Classification of Causes of Death. The lawfulness of death registration, which depended on a commonly defined classification system, became of immense statistical value for both state and non-state institutions, and particularly for the new disciplines of public health, epidemiology and demography. Statistical analyses of records of the dead were harnessed by a panoply of institutions to define the shape of a population, monitor its variations and fluctuations, predict patterns of dying, highlight risk factors, and ultimately intervene in the conditions of life to manipulate the ‘average’ life expectancy of segments of a population.
The secularization of death registration in the nineteenth century was thus integral to statistical laws of mortality because it made possible the institutional practice of extrapolating death from individual human beings and arranging it in a table in an enumerated form. Registration drained death of all its phenomena, abstracted it as a number and weaved its laws into the seams of the population. In recording an individual death, discovering its underlying cause, classifying it according to universal nomenclature and mapping it against mortality trends, governments could construct the ‘naturalness’ of a population. Statisticians could tame the chance of death; that is, they could calculate the risk of death in a population, for instance, that could be derived from a pandemic, and according to the science of epidemiology, attempt to ‘change the laws under which the population would evolve’ (Hacking 1991, 188). Populations have long lived under elaborate laws of classification, Hacking reminds us, such as the laws of death registration and classification systems for death causation, which both shape a calculus of probabilities of dying. I suggest that the calculation of risk of death as a technology of governmentality emerged alongside the problematization of life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The ‘quantification [of death] as a rate that could be measured and monitored was indispensable to how governments invested in life to the point where individuals were allowed to perish’ (Trabsky 2022 a, 547).
The economization of quantification
Foucault’s lectures on ‘Governmentality’, delivered at the Collège de France in 1978, introduce another facet of the exercise of power in the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ‘The word “economy”, which in the sixteenth century signified a form of government, comes in the eighteenth century to designate a level of reality, a field of intervention through a series of complex processes that I regard as absolutely fundamental to our history’ (Foucault 1991, 93). The concept of economy was expanded in the eighteenth century from its limited designation of the activities of households to a more extensive description of the problem of circulation of people, goods and things. The new art of government that emerged in this era involved managing relations between the living and the dead, or, more precisely, entailed the development of technologies for controlling different aspects of those relations at the level of the population, such as the extent to which human capital circulates in an economy of life and death. As I discussed above, what was central to the government of populations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was mortality statistics, which were supported by technologies of death registration. However, statistical data was also crucial to techniques of economization. Without establishing institutions whose purpose was to collate statistics, and to normalize the regularities of life and death, the expansion of the notion of economy in the government of populations and the economic rationalization of markets would have been unmanageable.
The extension of economic rationality into ‘domains which are not exclusively or not primarily economic’ (2008, 323) would for Foucault be emblematic of neoliberalism in the twentieth century. Wendy Brown expands upon Foucault’s writings on the concept of economy by noting that ‘[w]idespread economization of heretofore noneconomic domains, activities, and subjects’ does not necessarily denote the ‘marketization or monetization of them’ (Brown 2015, 31–2). Indeed, the uniqueness of neoliberalism is how it economizes all spheres of human activity. Neoliberal rationality is irreducible to the monetization of life, the accumulation of capital through market exchange or the privatization of public goods. It is rather a ‘governing rationality’ that frames and measures every aspect of life and death by ‘economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized’ (Brown 2015, 10). What this ultimately means is that a condition of possibility of human life – what Foucault calls ‘homo oeconomicus’ – is a historically specific form of economic rationality which extols, for example, human beings to privilege future benefits over immediate gains and thereby optimize the economic value of time (Trabsky 2022 b, 104).
If neoliberal rationality is a useful paradigm for understanding the governance of life in the twenty-first century, it is because it constructs the state and individuals on the model of corporate firms and self-investing, future-oriented entrepreneurs, who participate in an economy of human capital by competing against each other. ‘Economization is a model for the conduct of government, but also a model for the government of the self, where both persons and states transform society into a market and themselves into market actors’ (Trabsky 2022b, 104–5). The homo oeconomicus that I mentioned above becomes a market actor that ‘takes its shape [everywhere] as human capital seeking to strengthen its competitive positioning and appreciate its value, rather than as a figure of exchange or interests’ (Brown 2015, 33). Brown builds upon Koray Çaliskan and Michel Callon’s (2009, 370) performative concept of economization, which they utilize to describe ‘behaviours, organizations, institutions and, more generally, the objects in a particular society … as “economic”’, to account for how the figure of homo oeconomicus extends into areas of life that were once thought of as not exclusively or primarily economic.
Eve Darian-Smith (2021, 62) has recently explored the idea that governments have cultivated ‘economies of death’ during COVID-19, particularly when they allow ‘disposable people’ to die to open up the economy. While she emphasizes that death has always acquired a quantum of value for capitalism, Darian-Smith misrecognizes how the language of economization is more diffuse during the pandemic than calls for ‘profit over people’ or that ‘business is suffering’. The basis for this misrecognition is the irreducible equation of value to money or utility to profit. Economies of death do not simply facilitate the monetization or marketization of death; they frame and measure death in economic terms. Dying in, rather than for, the economy connotes how death is always already subject to a raison d’être of neoliberalism, such as the replacement of exchange with competition, the substitution of labour with human capital and the augmentation of socioeconomic inequality, which in turn renders death as economically valuable in itself. In this extension of techniques of economization into an area of life that was once thought of as not exclusively economic, the dying and the dead circulate in the economy as ‘human capital’. Indeed, I contend that the dead never stop circulating as capital, whether in the recycling of human remains, as a figure in a mortality rate or as an absence that brings together a nation, which is a more accurate description of how COVID-19 has transformed and augmented extant economies of death.
Darian-Smith builds her argument about COVID-19 economies of death from Fatmir Haskaj’s analysis of the ‘necroeconomy’. Although Haskaj accounts for how death has become a source of value due to ‘neoliberalism’s tendency to marketize all aspects of human activity’ (Haskaj 2018, 1149), the focus of his article is on how killings due to war, genocide, poverty, starvation and global warming create necroeconomies. Yet the problem with conceptualizing death as a negative of biopolitics – which is also what Darian-Smith does in the context of COVID-19 – is that it misses how all deaths, whether sudden or expected, unnatural or ordinary, violent or accidental, are normalized as allowable by the state. In other words, necroeconomies are not exclusive of biopower and death is not the negation of biopolitics, because the institutional routinization of mortality, and the normalizing technologies that take care of those deaths – an array of administrative, medical, legal, fiscal and social practices that integrate the dead into the worlds of the living – are immanent within techniques of economization. Even though Haskaj admits that a normal amount of death in a population circulates in economies of human capital, his primary focus is on the killing of populations and on the dead as ‘victims’ of capitalism, rather than those individuals or segments of the population, which in the course of the everyday, are allowed to perish.2 This schema of necroeconomy is unable to account for how neoliberal rationality transforms the governance of mortality during a pandemic.
The language of economization suffuses relations between life and death during COVID-19 through a range of legal technologies, such as practices for registering a death, classifying its cause, enumerating it in a table and calculating probabilities of risk. The reification of a ‘normal’ death rate, which is represented as both a cause and effect of tracking ‘excessive mortality’ during a pandemic, involves the use of mortality statistics to tame the disorder of chance. However, the life or death of an individual during a pandemic is as dependent on chance as it is on governmental interventions that manage fluctuations in mortality trends. No matter whether these interventions are discussed by government officials or debated by epidemiologists, the economic transactions that arise here involve performing ‘calculations and metrics, via daily updates, nowcasts, forecasts … and through media stories of projections and mathematicians’ (Rhodes and Lancaster 2020, 4). Or to put this differently, death is subject to statistical analysis: a quantification and computation that facilitates cost–benefit calculations. Throughout the pandemic governments have asked whether the minimization of COVID-19 death will result in a net increase or decrease of death for a given population, and what are the economic costs or benefits for how mortality statistics are ‘normalized’ within or across populations. ‘To the extent possible, we had to calculate the number of lives saved by shutting down the world and compare it with the number imperilled by the shutdown’ (Lévy 2020, 31). These questions, which underpin the collection and dissemination of mortality statistics during a pandemic, are not mere rhetorical flourishes. Rather, they reflect the degree to which technologies of registration and statistical laws of mortality economize relations between life and death.
The idea that governments make use of cost–benefit calculations when devising a public health response to a pandemic can be gleaned from the release of provisional mortality statistics by the Australian Bureau of Statistics for the period January 2020 to May 2021. Mortality rates for this period were compared to the expected number of deaths based on records from 2015 to 2019. The headline insight from the data was that there were an extra 3,475 deaths (6.3%) for the period January to May 2021 when compared to the baseline average death rate for 2015 to 2019.3 Notably, the data do not include any deaths referred to coroners, which would include sudden, unnatural or violent deaths, such as suicides, accidents, deaths during or following a medical procedure or deaths in custody or care. The increase in deaths noted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics were not caused by COVID-19 – there were comparably few COVID-19 infections during this period – but rather due to cancer (6.0% higher), diabetes (9.2% higher), dementia (17.1% higher) and other respiratory diseases (5.8% higher). On the other hand, the death rate for pneumonia decreased by 21.9 per cent over the same period compared to the baseline average for 2015 to 2019 and no person died from influenza in Australia between July 2020 and May 2021.4 Researchers have primarily ascribed the causes of the increase in the death rate to the effects of public health responses to the pandemic on time-sensitive care provided in emergency departments for cardiac and stroke conditions, barriers to screening, diagnosing and treating cancers, postponement of elective surgery and increases in post-operational complications due to the general avoidance of medical treatment and care.5
The dissemination of mortality statistics during COVID-19 reveals the extent to which death is inextricable from economic analysis in the twenty-first century. Since the beginning of the pandemic, deaths caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus have been rationalized as an acceptable consequence of cost–benefit calculations routinely made by governments with respect to deaths caused by influenza, measles and other communicable diseases.6 But more than this, dying from or with COVID-19 is not simply a cost that has to be acknowledged by governments; the dying are required to leverage their ‘human capital’, adopt a ‘competitive positioning’ and commit to ‘value seeking’ amid a landscape of scarcity. This may take place in medical institutions, where practitioners make harrowing decisions about how to rationalize medical resources to save one life over another,7 and it also occurs in public forums, where epidemiologists, economists, journalists and researchers debate the merits of utilizing the concept of ‘Quality Adjusted Life Year’ to shape and evaluate a public health response to a global pandemic.8 In both examples, life tables, which are created by the bureau of statistics to track mortality rates and the life expectancy of a population, inform the making of decisions about the economic value of death.
The economization of death is not unprecedented in the Global North, but the way it has intertwined with technologies for counting the dead during COVID-19 signals the extent to which economization has transformed the governance of mortality in the twenty-first century. This is different from the economization life, which has recently been subject to analysis in the social sciences. Katherine Kenny, for example, contends that the World Bank’s DALY metric frames ‘health as a form of human capital and … as a site of investment’ (Kenny 2015, 11). The DALY metric was invented to quantify the ‘global burden of disease’ by calculating rates of death, disease and disability together, or rather ‘mortality and morbidity in the same unit of analysis’ (11). The amount of disease in the world could then be used to justify a particular public health initiative through the use of cost–benefit calculations. Kenny contends that ‘the DALY metric figures life in distinctly economic terms … as a revenue stream the duration of which determines the potential return on investment in human capital’ (12). In a similar vein, Michelle Murphy examines global health, family planning and development projects as practices that ‘differentially value and govern life in terms of their ability to foster the macroeconomy of the nation-state, such as life’s ability to contribute to the gross domestic product (GDP) of the nation’ (Murphy 2017, 6). In her macrological analysis, Murphy focuses on how governments adopt calculative practices in categorizing ‘lives worth living, lives worth not dying, lives worthy of investment, and lives not worth being born’ (7). In focusing exclusively on the economization of life, both Kenny and Murphy characterize death as a failure of the entrepreneurial homo oeconomicus to invest in themselves, and thus neglect to examine how accounting practices, metrics and calculations of risk disaggregate death into data and circulate it in an economy of human capital.
What COVID-19 exposes, then, is that the economization of death is not simply the inverse of the economization of life. Mortality statistics shape the calculus of probabilities of the opportunity costs of pursuing a particular public health response or omitting to act sooner in the enforcement of laws that restrict social interactions. Counting the dead becomes a qualitative judgement about the value of a life lived well or the value of an untimely, premature death, which exacerbates economic inequalities and disproportionately impacts marginalized communities, immigrants and people of colour. For Stefania Milan (2020, 3), this judgement is a ‘blind spot’ of public health responses obsessed with ‘quantification and categorization’. The economization of death shows wilful blindness towards how COVID-19 differentially impacts on communities that were already economically disadvantaged by requiring the dying to adopt a competitive positioning and the dead to circulate as statistics in an economy of human capital.
Conclusions: the pandemic of the unvaccinated
Technologies for counting the dead demonstrate how economic rationality is woven through cost–benefit calculations during a pandemic. However, calculating practices are not simply models for the conduct of government; they are also techniques for the government of self, which will lead to differential experiences of dying. In calculating the risks of death during a pandemic, individuals must fashion themselves as entrepreneurial, self-investing homo oeconomicus, and they do so in a way that demonstrates how economic rationality is inextricable from the governance of mortality. While nascent at the beginning of the pandemic and expressed in the first year by adopting techniques for self-assessing one’s risk of contracting Coronavirus, by the second year the homo oeconomicus of COVID-19 has effusively emerged, cajoled by governments to not only assess whether it is useful to self-administer a rapid antigen test or abandon testing all together, but importantly also to weigh the risks of refusing or consenting to vaccination.9 It is also likely that the calculation of risk of death must be made periodically, given indications that multiple booster shots may be necessary to maintain a degree of immunity to severe illness from COVID-19 (Knott 2021).
What I am suggesting here is that the subjective assessment of an individual’s risk of death (and by extension the risk of death to others) and its affirmation by governments is inextricable from a neoliberal rationality that has subjugated all spheres of human activity to economic terms. The individual can of course make a decision about whether to test for Coronavirus, wear a mask or vaccinate themselves, but only by performing the role of homo oeconomicus: ‘an intensely constructed and governed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its endeavors and venues’ (Brown 2015, 10). Whether this performance consists of theorizing the economic consequences of increasing or decreasing the risks of exposure, transmission, hospitalization or death from COVID-19 for oneself, for another or for the state, the practice of such cost–benefit calculations reifies the future value of the individual’s life and death. To put this differently, I contend that decision-making regarding testing, masking or vaccination is intertwined with techniques of economization, value seeking and competitive positioning. Individuals are fashioning themselves during the pandemic as homo oeconomicus, and they are assessing their capacity to make decisions about living and dying by reference to an economic rationality constituted as ‘sophisticated common sense, a reality principle remaking institutions and human beings everywhere it settles, nestles, and gains affirmation’ (Brown 20 15, 35).
This chapter has examined how technologies for counting the dead during COVID-19 have economized relations between life and death. They have done so to the extent that governments make decisions based on counting to allow individuals to perish, and individuals perform calculations of risk with the aid of mortality statistics to position themselves as ‘human capital’ in an economy of rationalization of resources. It is important to recognize how the language of economization suffuses these relations and how technologies of counting – registering a death, mortality statistics and cost–benefit calculations – permeate public health responses to a global pandemic. Qualitative judgements about the economic value of a life and a death underpin decision making in medical institutions – the rationalization of medical resources in emergency departments – and at the level of government – the development of policies and enforcement of laws that involve cost–benefit calculations about the amount of life and death that can be tolerated by a population. But these judgements also operate at the level of the self, and it is thus necessary to examine how practices for counting the dead will lead to differential experiences of dying during the pandemic. In calculating risks of dying during a pandemic, individuals must fashion themselves as homo oeconomicus, and they do so in a way that demonstrates how economic rationality is inextricable from the governance of mortality in the twenty-first century.
Notes
1. This chapter takes parts from and builds upon previous writings on COVID-19 (Trabsky 2022a) and the economization of death in the twenty-first century (Trabsky 2022b).
2. ‘But the abandonment of “life” … does not sufficiently cover the resonance of a global economic system that produces regimes that cannibalize their own population as vessels for a “quantum of value”. To abandon life is simply to ignore it, or to exclude segments of the population from any share of the social product. This is certainly one tendency under neoliberalism, the tendency toward undoing of the welfare state and assault upon the poor. But exclusion alone … is but one side of the process that also directly and deliberately instrumentalizes human life and human death’ (Haskaj 2018, 1155). Haskaj represents the necroeconomy as exclusive of biopower by conceptualizing the dead as ‘victims’ of the accumulation of capital. It is unclear whether the dead manifest as victims because they are stripped of their humanity or are reduced to a commodity. I contend that the dead continue to work after death, and as such the reduction of their status to victimhood does not account for how the living continue to form productive relations with the dead.
3. Australian Bureau of Statistics (n.d.). On fewer elderly deaths in Australia in 2020, see Dana McCauley (2020). See also Caitlin Cassidy (2020).
4. This phenomenon took place across the Southern Hemisphere in 2020: Michael Safi (2020).
5. On avoiding urgent medical care during lockdown, see Ashleigh McMillan and Marissa Calligeros (2020), Nadia Daly (2020), Melissa Cunningham (2020), Melissa Cunningham and Dana McCauley (2020).
6. Consider the significance of when the prime minister of Australia compared the governmental management of COVID-19 to that of influenza: Nick Bonyhady (2021). And the counter-argument to his claim: Aisha Dow and Rachel Clun (2021).
7. On the rationing of medical resources in Italy, see Bevan Shields (2020) and Andrea Vogt and Erica Di Blasi (2020). For Australia, see Ruby Cornish (2020) and Kate Aubusson (2020).
8. There are numerous examples of this debate taking place throughout the world during 2020 and 2021. See, for example, Alan Collins and Adam Cox (2020), Chris Uhlmann (2020), Chip Le Grand (2020), Cathy Mihalopoulos, Martin Hensher and Catherine Bennett (2020), Liam Mannix (2020), Robert Bezimienny (2021).
9. On calculation of risks of death from vaccination, see Liam Mannix and Lisa Visentin (2021). To map this calculation on a global level, consider Stephanie Nebehay and Douglas Busvine (2021).
References
Aubusson, K. (2020) ‘COVID-19 hospital bed lotteries could decide who lives and dies’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 9 April) https://www.smh.com.au/national/covid-19-hospital-bed-lotteries-could-decide-who-lives-and-dies-20200407-p54htu.html.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2021) Provision Mortality Statistics (January 2020–May 2021) https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provisional-mortality-statistics/latest-release#data-download.
Bayatrizi, Z. (2009) ‘Counting the dead and regulating the living: early modern statistics and the formation of the sociological imagination (1662–1897)’ 60(3) The British Journal of Sociology 603–21.
Bezimienny, R. (2021) ‘Lockdowns don’t just save lives, they cost lives too’ (The Age, 26 August) https://www.theage.com.au/national/lockdowns-don-t-just-save-lives-they-cost-lives-too-20210825-p58lvu.html.
Bonyhady, N. (2021) ‘Australia to slash traveller intake, PM announces pathway out of COVID-19’ (The Age, 2 July) https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/australia-to-slash-traveller-intake-pm-announces-pathway-out-of-covid-19-20210702-p5869s.html.
Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books.
Çaliskan, K. and M. Callon (2009) ‘Economization, part 1: shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization’ 38(3) Economy and Society 369–98.
Cassidy, C. (2020) ‘Overall death rates are down – now the bad news’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 21 August) https://www.smh.com.au/national/overall-death-rates-are-down-now-the-bad-news-20200821-p55nxm.html.
Collins, A. and A. Cox (2020) ‘Coronavirus: why lockdown may cost young lives over time’ (The Conversation, 26 March) https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-why-lockdown-may-cost-young-lives-over-time-134580.
Cornish, R. (2020) ‘Doctors seek ethical framework for prioritising resources, patients amid coronavirus pandemic’ (The Drum, 31 March) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-31/doctors-ask-for-ethics-guidelines-amid-coronavirus/12107476.
Cunningham, M. (2020) ‘“I couldn’t let a mate die”: study shows hidden spike in cardiac deaths’ (The Age, 26 September) https://www.smh.com.au/national/i-couldn-t-let-a-mate-die-study-shows-hidden-spike-in-cardiac-deaths-20200924-p55ysx.html.
Cunningham, M. and D. McCauley (2020) ‘Cancer screening rates plummet during pandemic’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 8 October) https://www.smh.com.au/national/cancer-screening-rates-plummet-during-pandemic-20201007-p562u5.html.
Daly, N. (2020) ‘Cancer tests and operations dropped by up to 50 per cent during April lockdown, data shows’ (ABC News, 13 September) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-14/cancer-tests-operations-drop-up-to-50-per-cent-april-coronavirus/12622396.
Darian-Smith, E. (2021) ‘Dying for the economy: disposable people and economies of death in the Global North’ 10(1) State Crime Journal 61–79.
Davis, N. (2022) ‘WHO estimates 15m people killed directly or indirectly by Covid pandemic’ (The Guardian, 5 May) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/05/who-estimates-15m-people-were-killed-by-covid-or-overwhelmed-health-systems.
Dow, A. and R. Clun (2021) ‘“A lot more dead people”: COVID too dangerous to be treated like flu’ (The Age, 3 July) https://www.theage.com.au/national/a-lot-more-dead-people-covid-too-dangerous-to-be-treated-like-flu-20210702-p586d5.html.
Foucault, M. (1991) ‘Governmentality’ in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 87–104.
Foucault, M. (1998) The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge, translated by R. Hurley. New York: Penguin Books.
Foucault, M. (2003a) Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975 translated by G. Burchell. New York: Picador.
Foucault, M. (2003b) Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 translated by D. Macey. New York: Picador.
Foucault, M. (2004) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 translated by G. Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, translated by G. Burchell. New York: Picador.
Hacking, I. (1990) The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hacking, I. (1991) ‘How should we do the history of statistics?’ in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haskaj, F. (2018) ‘From biopower to necroeconomies: neoliberalism, biopower and death economies’ 44(10) Philosophy and Social Criticism 1148–68.
Kenny, K. E. (2015) ‘The biopolitics of global health: life and death in neoliberal time’ 51(1) Journal of Sociology 9–27.
Knott, M. (2021) ‘Pfizer CEO says third COVID jab may be needed, plus annual booster’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 16 April) https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/pfizer-ceo-says-third-covid-jab-may-be-needed-plus-annual-booster-20210416-p57jom.html.
Le Grand, C. (2020) ‘Melbourne Uni chief says Victoria must address difficult ethical questions’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 19 September) https://www.smh.com.au/national/melbourne-uni-chief-says-victoria-must-address-difficult-ethical-questions-20200919-p55x82.html.
Lévy, B.-H. (2020) The Virus in the Age of Madness. New Haven: Yale University Press.
McCauley, D. (2020) ‘Aged care deaths fall during pandemic with influenza at record levels’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 12 September) https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/aged-care-deaths-fall-during-pandemic-with-influenza-at-record-lows-20200912-p55uzt.html.
McMillan, A. and M. Calligeros (2020), ‘Wary Victorians stay away from emergency departments’ (The Age, 11 September) https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/victoria-records-43-new-covid-19-cases-nine-deaths-20200911-p55ul1.html.
Mannix, L. (2020) ‘Numbers show lockdowns are a “no brainer”. Letting people die isn’t’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 3 October) https://www.smh.com.au/national/numbers-show-lockdowns-are-a-no-brainer-letting-people-die-isn-t-20200922-p55y3z.html.
Mannix, L. and L. Visentin (2021) ‘Doctors stop offering AstraZeneca jabs over legal risk’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 11 April) https://www.smh.com.au/national/doctors-stop-offering-astrazeneca-jabs-over-legal-risk-20210410-p57i5f.html.
Mihalopoulos, C., M. Hensher and C. Bennett (2020) ‘Lockdown is working, but is it excessive?’ (The Age, 25 September) https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/lockdown-is-working-but-is-it-excessive-20200924-p55yyz.html.
Milan, S. (2020) ‘Techno-solutionism and the standard human in the making of the COVID-19 pandemic’ 7 Big Data & Society 1–7.
Murphy, M. (2017) The Economization of Life. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Nebehay, S. and D. Busvine (2021) ‘Wealthy nations’ vaccine switch to shore up supply among poorest’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 10 April) https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/wealthy-nations-vaccine-switch-to-shore-up-supply-among-poorest-20210410-p57i29.html.
Rhodes, T. and K. Lancaster (2020) ‘Mathematical models as public troubles in COVID-19 infection control: following the numbers’ 29 Health Sociology Review https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242.2020.1764376.
Safi, M. (2020) ‘Southern hemisphere has record low flu cases amid Covid lockdowns’ (The Guardian, 17 September) https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/sep/17/falling-flu-rates-in-southern-hemisphere-offers-hope-as-winter-approaches-coronavirus.
Shields, B. (2020) ‘Italian doctors propose intensive care age limit to save younger patients’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 12 March) https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/italian-doctors-propose-intensive-care-age-limit-to-save-younger-patients-20200312-p5499t.html.
Trabsky, M. (2022a) ‘Normalising death in the time of a pandemic’ 12(3) Oñati Socio-Legal Series 540–55.
Trabsky, M. (2022b) ‘The Neoliberal Rationality of Voluntary Assisted Dying’ in D. J. Fleming and D. J. Carter (eds) Voluntary Assisted Dying: Law? Health? Justice? Canberra: ANU Press, 95–111.
Uhlmann, C. (2020) ‘COVID-19 has hammered home some uncomfortable truths about us as a people’ (The Age, 16 September) https://www.theage.com.au/national/covid-19-has-hammered-home-some-uncomfortable-truths-about-us-as-a-people-20200915-p55vrb.html#comments.
Vogt, A. and E. Di Blasi (2020) ‘Italy may abandon over-80s to their fate as crisis grows’ (The Age, 15 March) https://amp.theage.com.au/world/europe/italy-may-abandon-over-80s-to-their-fate-as-crisis-grows-20200315-p54a75.html.