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Data, Politics and Public Health: COVID-19 Data-Driven Decision Making in Public Discourse

Authors:

Teresa M. Harrison,

Theresa A. PardoAuthors Info & Claims

Digital Government: Research and Practice, Volume 2, Issue 1

Article No.: 11, Pages 1 - 8

https://doi.org/10.1145/3428123

Published: 03 December 2020 Publication History

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Abstract

In spring 2020, New York City became the acknowledged epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. To keep residents informed, Governor Cuomo conducted a streak of 111 daily press briefings reporting critical information about the status of the pandemic in the State at large, and New York City in particular. We show that through these briefings Governor Cuomo introduced an audience of New Yorkers and others to concepts basic to data-driven decision making such as data, science, models, and projections, and in so doing claimed that his decisions were unrelated to politics or whim. But we further suggest that data-driven decision making is not always immune from politics and human frailty in government. We conclude that basing policy decisions on data requires that policymakers insure the creation of a resilient and trustworthy health care data infrastructure to function as the scaffolding upon which policy making takes place.

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Digital Government: Research and Practice

Digital Government: Research and Practice Volume 2, Issue 1

COVID-19 Commentaries

January 2021

116 pages

EISSN:2639-0175

DOI:10.1145/3434277

Editors:
Soon Ae Chun
City University of New York, USA
,
Beth Simone Noveck
The Governance Lab and New York University, USA

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 03 December 2020

Online AM: 13 November 2020

Accepted: 01 October 2020

Revised: 01 September 2020

Received: 01 August 2020

Published in DGOV Volume 2, Issue 1

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Cited By

Lorvão Antunes ABarateiro JCardoso E(2024)Strategic Analysis in the Public Sector Using Semantic Web TechnologiesDigital Government: Research and Practice10.1145/36565875:3(1-20)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656587
Trivedi AJansen MDoekemeijer KTalluri STehrany N(2024) Reviving Storage Systems Education in the 21 st Century — An experience report 2024 IEEE 24th International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid)10.1109/CCGrid59990.2024.00074(616-625)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/CCGrid59990.2024.00074
Oladejo SWatson LWatson BRajaratnam KKotze MKell DPretorius E(2023)Data sharing: A Long COVID perspective, challenges, and road map for the futureSouth African Journal of Science10.17159/sajs.2023/14719119:5/6Online publication date: 30-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2023/14719
Scriney MTimilsina MCurry EPorwol LNie DDahley DFernandez JD’Aquin MRoantree M(2023)Engineering Data Assets for Public Health Applications: A Covid-19 Case Study2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)10.1109/BigData59044.2023.10386435(1853-1862)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData59044.2023.10386435
Danemayer JYoung AGreen SEzenwa LKlein M(2023)Responding to the coronavirus disease-2019 pandemic with innovative data use: The role of data challengesData & Policy10.1017/dap.2023.65Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1017/dap.2023.6
Gao YJanssen M(2022)The Open Data Canvas–Analyzing Value Creation from Open DataDigital Government: Research and Practice10.1145/35111023:1(1-15)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3511102
Su Z(2021)Rigorous Policy-Making Amid COVID-19 and Beyond: Literature Review and Critical InsightsInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health10.3390/ijerph18231244718:23(12447)Online publication date: 26-Nov-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182312447
Daher‐Nashif S(2021)In sickness and in health: The politics of public health and their implications during the COVID‐19 pandemicSociology Compass10.1111/soc4.1294916:1Online publication date: 3-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12949

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