David Fleming & Niall McCrae

From the very beginning of the Covid-19 spectacle, the central image was not the virus itself but the graphical trajectory of contagion. The idea of ‘flattening the curve’ became the emotional trigger for unprecedented restrictions to be accepted by citizens across the world. Governments justified their radical policies as scientific and caring. Representing real people testing positive for the terrifying disease, real people admitted to hospital and real people dying, the curve was a psychological weapon. The public health response wasn’t really meant to stop or shorten the death curve, but to amplify it.

The Covid-19 curve was a piece of narrative architecture so clever that even critics helped to build it. Drawn to apparent refutations of the deadliness of Covid-19 and the effectiveness of interventions to control its spread, sceptics unwittingly cemented the official truth of a pandemic pattern. By showing that the peak was earlier and lower than claimed by the authorities and lockdown zealots, they took the bait.

Diamond Princess

Cruise ships have proliferated in recent decades. At any time a population of hundreds of thousands is at sea, between ports of call. When the Covid-19 pandemic was declared by the World Health Organisation, cruises were cancelled, but several liners were still on the oceans. One ship was on the mainstream media news every day in early 2020, after passengers tested positive for the virus. Built in 2004 for the Princess Cruise Line, with 1351 cabins, the Diamond Princess carried a large number of people in proximity. Having  no contact with land, the ship acted as a Petri dish for the Covid-19 contagion.

The Diamond Princess was one of the first Covid horror stories: a luxury vessel turned floating quarantine zone. Scientists, particularly those with a sceptical eye – jumped on the data, finding that the virus wasn’t nearly as deadly as claimed. The world was informed that seven people died on a holiday of their dreams, but death on cruise ships is not unusual – largely elderly passengers with limited access to hospital if they become ill.  The majority of people on board (83%) did not contract the virus, and this was used as evidence by scientists such as John Ioannidis that transmission and morbidity did not support the apocalyptic projections pushed by politicians and media.

In fact, incidence on the Diamond Princess was similar to the rates reported elsewhere. The vessel had become a global symbol of Covid-19; its numbers – while small – were grafted on to the emotive schema of the pandemic. The Diamond Princess was used to imply a real curve, a real contagion and a real danger. Sceptics (e.g. in Unherd and Spectator articles) validated this by treating the data as real, when the very premise (a novel, deadly pathogen) was unproven.

Read more: Blinded by the curve: how Covid-19 sceptics were fooled

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