Digitalization and a Pandemic

One characteristic of good governance is that political decisions are evidence-based. Facts and figures, with their scientific and technical nature, appear to be outside the political realm and thus immune to any infection by political interests. However, it is important to make political decisions in a knowledge-based and democratic way. The question of how this can be achieved under the influence of “populist” tendencies is becoming increasingly urgent. Governing based on expert knowledge and facts has recently led to a deep-seated mistrust amongst parts of the population, which has led to an increase in voices in politics questioning the credibility of scientific results and the existence of facts. When everything is relativized in this way and citizens’ trust in institutions and figures is turned into distrust, serious politics and reliable statistics lose massive prestige. This development is reinforced by the increasing importance of digitalisation and its influence on official statistics and politics. It is particularly evident in the ethical issues and conflicts that arise in connection with the methods used to collect and disseminate statistical data on the Corona pandemic. Depending on governmental influence, trends up to and including total surveillance can be observed. Contact tracing with the help of smartphone apps has played a specific role since the outbreak of the pandemic. For some years now, technological developments, whether less important (video-on-demand, contactless payment) or essential (remote work, internet shopping, social networks), have had the effect of reducing physical contact, especially between people. It is worth taking a closer look at the development of digitalisation and its relationship to the Corona pandemic. There seem to be at least two reasons to link these two experiences: First, the Corona pandemic is likely to accelerate the transformation to a “perfect” digital world that has already begun, and second, the similarity with digitalisation in terms of the complexity of processes and structures is striking. Ethical issues emerge about their adequate treatment in politics and official statistics. One of the tasks for improving and deepening reporting on the Corona pandemic would be to set up and maintain a central system of comprehensive registers in cooperation with the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis). Those who see central registers as the gateway to the surveillance state need to prove this point using Austria as an example. Statistics Austria has, among other things, a central tax register, a central population register and a central vaccination register, which enables a comparison of data on the pandemic.