26 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
ENDIS NEARDEPT.
POINTILLISM
C
OVID-19. Should we freak out or
stop freaking out? Is this the big
one, a prelude to the big one, or just an-
other one? A devastating plague or a
souped-up cold or something in between?
On Friday morning, two hours before
the stock market opened and resumed
its plunge, amid deepening fears of a
global pandemic, W. Ian Lipkin, one of
the world’s leading infectious-disease ep-
idemiologists, sat in his living room, on
the Upper West Side, preparing to head
back into the fray. He was dressed for
TV—he’d been making the rounds. “I
never turn down Fox,” he said. “It’s an
opportunity to preach in the wilderness.”
Lipkin, who is sixty-seven, directs
the Center for Infection and Immu-
nity, at Columbia University’s Mailman
School of Public Health, where attempts
to develop a better diagnostic test for
COVID-19 are under way. (Lab techni-
cians have been using genetic samples,
rather than the live virus, out of caution.)
In January, Lipkin travelled to China to
investigate the outbreak. On his return,
he self-quarantined for fourteen days at
the university’s request, mainly in the
basement of his house (his wife left him
meals at the top of the stairs), before re-
turning to his lab. That was two weeks,
more than ten thousand cases, and four
thousand points on the Dow ago.
Lipkin, who was the scientific con-
sultant for the well-regarded we’re-all-
gonna-die film “Contagion,” moved to
the city in 2000, after discovering the
connection between encephalitis and the
spread of West Nile virus in New York.
Then came 9/11, the anthrax scare, and
the creation of a national network of so-
called biodefense centers. Lipkin ran the
one in New York. In 2003, he went to
China to help advise the government on
its response to SARS, an earlier coronavirus,
and since then he has travelled there every
year, as part of an effort to share infor-
mation and cultivate coöperation. He first
heard about Covid-19 from a colleague
in Guangzhou, a month before the rest
of the world became aware of it. “He told
me, ‘There’s some weird thing going on
in Wuhan,’” Lipkin said. “On December
31st, researchers there identified it as a
coronavirus but said, ‘It’s not highly trans-
missible.’ So much for that assessment!”
He went on, “It’s going to be difficult to
know who knew what when.”
Lipkin was more concerned with the
virus itself: how widely it has spread, why
some people get it and others don’t, how
to counteract it. “The trick with all this
is, it’s an arms race,” he said. “The virus
is evading you. You want to make sure
you keep up with it.” He added that he
was “cautiously optimistic” that citizens
and governments will now be more care-
ful, and that we can accelerate the de-
velopment of drugs and a vaccine. Still,
he said, “things are going to get shut
down. And this virus is probably going
to be with us for some time to come. It
might become endemic, like measles.”
He is reticent, at least for the record,
about the Trump Administration’s han-
dling of the crisis, the wisdom of stag-
ing the Olympics in Japan, and the panic
seizing global equity markets. He said
that he has consulting gigs with several
corporations, and talks regularly with
chief executives: “I’ve gotten a lot of calls.
A lot of them really just want to protect
their employees and customers. There’s
the other kind, too, who want me to call
them fifteen minutes before, say, the fed-
eral government announces that it’s going
to shut down all the bridges and tunnels
in and out of Manhattan.”
It has been determined that the virus
is present in human feces. In Asia, Lip-
kin noted, the plumbing in many kitch-
in Packingham v. North Carolina, that
social media is a public sphere, a deci-
sion that rested on the Court’s belief in
its ubiquity. “Everybody uses Twitter,”
Justice Elena Kagan said. In fact, only
about one in five Americans has used it.
Most people who have a Twitter account
rarely use it, and very few of those who
do post about politics. The ones who do,
post a lot—sometimes even as much as
the President—and they’re atypical in
other ways, too. A study from a decade
ago found that the average political
tweeter is “a white male in his 30s or 40s
who has moderate-to-high household
income and considers himself to be a po-
litical junkie.” The Twitterati have be-
come more diverse in the years since;
Black Lives Matter and MeToo arose
on the platform. Still, it remains a very
poor proxy for the electorate. In 2018, ac-
cording to the Pew Research Center,
ninety-seven per cent of all tweets posted
by American adults about national pol-
itics were posted by ten per cent of tweet-
ers. A disproportionate number of the
people in Twitter’s town hall are the sorts
of people who were eligible to vote in
1820, before the first, Jackson-era expan-
sion of the electorate: the wealthy, the
educated, and the hyperpartisan. Twit-
ter isn’t the future of American democ-
racy; it’s the past.
A simulation of democracy taking
the place of the real thing has been a
long time coming. It began, arguably,
during the 1960 Presidential election,
when John F. Kennedy’s campaign hired
a pioneering predictive-analytics com-
pany, called the Simulmatics Corpora-
tion, to provide advice on how a Dem-
ocrat could win back the White House,
using an invention that it called a Peo-
ple Machine. Simulmatics aggregated
polls (not unlike the way that FiveThirty-
Eight aggregates polls), divided the elec-
torate into four hundred and eighty
voter types, came up with an algorithm
to model their voting behavior, and then
conducted a simulation of the election
(quite similar to that conducted by the
Washington Post’s new Simulator). The
firm advised Kennedy to speak forth-
rightly about his Catholicism, and, after
he won, Simulmatics took credit, which
led to reports that the President-elect
had relied on “a secretly designed robot
campaign strategist nicknamed a ‘people-
machine.’” Had he cheated? Should that
kind of thing be illegal? People asked
those questions, but then, after a while,
no one blinked an eye.
“Some critics say this is dehumaniz-
ing,” a Simulmatics executive admitted.
But, he asked, “Why should politicians
operate in the dark? If there are two Peo-
ple Machines working against each other
in a political campaign—that would be
progress.” Everyone’s got a people ma-
chine, lately. You’ve probably got one in
your pocket. It is not progress.
—Jill Lepore
