Statistics and political management during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Argentina

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic triggered the generation as well as the ample circulation of health statistics. This article examines the role that Covid-19 statistics acquired in the management of the Argentine health emergency. Argentina adopted lockdown measures early and initially had a strict social confinement with subsequent relaxations that became a coordination challenge in a society in crisis. This research followed a qualitative methodological strategy supported by systematic analysis of regulations, government reports, press articles, and presidential press conferences. On the one hand, the article explores the institutional structure behind the elaboration of Covid-19 statistics, focusing on statistical classifications, and underlines the tensions to which it was exposed. On the other hand, it shows how statistics were used to bestow legitimacy to the decisions of the political authority, staged in true rituals of quantification, as they were a means through which that authority was exercised. In addition to attributing meaning to a shared experience, statistical indicators became a device for coordinating action at a distance and from the center, restricting the margins of discretionary action of the subnational authorities and operating as an external and impersonal mechanism of regulation in a society disrupted by an exceptional situation.